Neshami Case Study
Kuwait Neshami Company Uses Hot Banana to Decrease Development Time
and Build Multilingual Web Sites for Their Customers
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Background
The Kuwait Neshami Company (
www.neshami.com
) is a leading IT consulting company headquartered in Kuwait. Since 2004, the company has developed and built business Web sites and online payment systems for a variety of companies, including the Commercial Bank of Kuwait (
www.cbk.com
), Al Safat Investment Company (
www.safatinvest.com
), and A’ayan Leasing and Investment Company (
www.aayan.com
). They also consult on a variety of Web-development projects and provide training on various IT-related matters.
According to Mai B. Alowayesh, IT Consultant for Neshami, since becoming a Channel Partner for Hot Banana, a leading ColdFusion-based Web Content Management System (Web CMS), in 2005, every Web site that Neshami builds includes the award-winning solution.
The Challenge
Before Hot Banana, Neshami’s Web development process was entirely manual, each site developed virtually from scratch and often further developed based on specific language requirements. Although they had templates, these were of limited use as each Web design and development project was different. This was of course, very time consuming, and Neshami knew there had to be a better, more efficient way.
After partnering with Hot Banana, for each new Web site the basic framework was already in place, significantly accelerating the completion of new Site projects. According to Alowayesh, “having a CMS system provides a framework. You get very good functions out of the box with which it is easy to integrate custom modules or expand the functionality of existing modules.”
The Solution
Using Hot Banana, Neshami can create a vast array of Web sites, from simple corporate sites to highly customized and complex sites. Neshami uses Hot Banana’s Web CMS as the framework for every Web site they build (with the exception of online payment sites), often focused on the multilingual requirements of their clients and their visitors.
Because so many of the Web sites Neshami builds are multilingual, the fact that Hot Banana is fully language compatible was key. Many of the other CMS’s that are available today do not support Arabic fully, but Hot Banana does. Even the Hot Banana custom modules that Neshami has developed can have multilingual capabilities added. This was understandably a huge benefit to Neshami as most of the Web site projects they take on need to have content in both Arabic and English.
Hot Banana’s Multilingual Manager is Unicode compliant and can therefore support content, labels and tags in any language including multi-byte languages such as Chinese and Arabic. As well, the login console can accommodate Hot Banana administrators and users with different language requirements, enabling them to log into the software under a particular language profile such as English, Arabic, French, Chinese, etc.
By partnering with Hot Banana, development time has shortened, enabling Neshami to take on more clients and increase their revenue and referrals accordingly. Since their channel partnership with Hot Banana was established, Neshami has experienced a 35% increase in business and revenues.
A’ayan Leasing & Investment Company
The first Web site Neshami built using Hot Banana was with A’ayan Leasing and Investment, a company that offers leasing and financing services to individuals and companies who need to lease cars, trucks, equipment and construction materials. Before coming to Neshami, they had a static Web site. However, they wanted to expand their online marketing program and therefore knew they needed a much more dynamic Web site with content that could be easily updated.
Using Hot Banana’s Web CMS, A’ayan’s new Web site allowed them to manage their content, send out newsletters, manage advertising space, and promote new automobiles and products on an as-needed basis. The online calendar was used to automatically schedule and announce company events and press releases. Neshami also developed an online payment system that A’ayan’s ever-growing list of customers could use to make payments on leased automobiles.
Other projects saw Neshami building on the functionality of Hot Banana’s out-of-the-box features. Programmed in ColdFusion, Hot Banana’s code-base is open and permits certified developers to access the core modules, create add-ons and integrate third-party applications. For example, for the Kuwait stock exchange, Neshami created a custom module within Hot Banana to take the live feeds of the latest stock price changes and activity and populate this content directly into Hot Banana modules of the A’ayan Web Site. The ability to do this automatically - to take live, ever-changing content and port it directly into a Web site via the Web CMS - was a very good selling point for Neshami.
For other clients, Neshami developed a small SMS module and easily integrated it directly into Hot Banana, providing them with SMS text message capabilities. Furthermore, Neshami’s in-house ColdFusion development team created a module for Commercial Bank of Kuwait permitting them to feed their investment funds information, rates, surcharges and performances on line. “Now we can resell this module again to another company,” said Alowayesh, further increasing the usability and profitability of the Hot Banana Web CMS.
“The good thing about Hot Banana is that each function can be used for different purposes, depending on the client and their needs. List Manager, for example, can be used as a product catalog, a service catalog - some companies even use it as an index page for their company magazine. This makes Hot Banana very adaptable. We can use the same function for different customers, each time calling it something different,” states Alowayesh.
For example, the Media Release module is very important for investment companies and financial services clients who need to keep their customers informed with up-to-the-minute, highly accurate information. They have a variety of content, press releases posted on their Web site, newsletters for their investors and other interested parties, and they need to be sure this content is always up to date.
Future Plans
Neshami’s business has been growing steadily and given the robust economy in Kuwait, they foresee their strong growth to continue. By using Hot Banana for their Web site development projects, “we guarantee ourselves an advantage over our competition who do not utilize a CMS system or who have not found one that is as functional, as efficient, and as profitable as Hot Banana has been for us. As well, the language capabilities of Hot Banana are unparalleled. It’s really been a successful partnership,” concludes Alowayesh.
