How Axelerant Unified the IRONMAN Race Brands

IRONMAN does not run one race brand, it runs several. The IRONMAN Pro Series is the flagship, with the Epic Series and Rock 'n' Roll alongside it, and each had grown its own digital experience. The content behind all of them is the most perishable kind there is: where the race is, what dates, how to prepare, and where you finished. Two of those brands were running on Ruby on Rails.

In this video, Hetal, Director of Global Delivery at Axelerant, and Vivek Radhakrishnan, Solutions Lead, explain how the rebuild worked. The Epic Series and Rock 'n' Roll moved onto Drupal, hosted on Acquia Cloud Platform. Axelerant then built one shared component library, one UX library, and one accessibility layer that carry across every brand.

The first people to feel it were the ones who publish. Time to create publishing workflows fell by 50 to 60 percent, and editors and content marketers now build and publish pages without waiting on engineering. Acquia Edge Security & Performance runs the content delivery layer and Acquia Search powered by SearchStax runs discoverability. Page views rose, and so did engagement and web vitals.

Reusability was the point. Each brand keeps its own character while consistency carries across all of them, so an athlete drawn to one race has a route to the next. Next came Acquia Content Optimization and Acquia Conversion Optimization, aimed at audience segments and at the community these races build. Watch the full story to hear why a race weekend is treated as a festival, not an event.