Traction on Demand: How Better Domain Management Reduced IT Workload and Boosted ESG Procurement

As a leading Salesforce partner, Traction on Demand develops innovative cloud technology solutions and applications for many of North America’s best known and most influential organizations.

What Business Challenges Motivated ToD to Move its Domain Portfolio to Webnames Corporate?

Towards the end of 2020, Traction on Demand started to reevaluate their corporate domain name portfolio. As their domain registrations grew into the triple digits, both the IT and administrative teams found managing them under a retail domain registrar increasingly inefficient. Managing renewals, DNS changes and other updates across hundreds of domains took away time and internal resources from other operational priorities.

Once the decision had been made to delegate domain management tasks to a corporate domain registrar, it became time to evaluate providers. As a technology company that develops best-in-class SaaS products, ToD was looking for an advanced platform to manage, control and secure their domain names, but also deep expertise in the domain space, full-service support to alleviate the strain on their IT team, and good value.

Not only did Webnames Corporate satisfy ToD’s business requirements, there also was strong alignment in corporate values and a focus on an impact driven approach to business — something that resonated, given ToD’s company-wide effort to address ESG concerns in its governance and procurement. As a company with a long track record of community engagement, inclusivity, and empowering businesses through technology, Webnames Corporate and Traction on Demand shared common core values.

What Features or Services Led to ToD Choosing Webnames Corporate over its Competitors?

Among the features and services provided by Webnames Corporate, Traction on Demand found 24/7 emergency escalation support, secure multi-user access, and a dedicated account manager to be core factors in their decision to choose Webnames.

The stability and security of Traction on Demand’s online presence is critically important given the number of brands and clients they interact with daily. As a key player in digital transformation, ToD understands the critical importance of domain and DNS uptime, as well the current cybersecurity threat landscape.

Technical difficulties need to be addressed and resolved immediately, no matter what time of day, making Webnames Corporate’s 24/7 emergency escalation support a decisive factor.

In a business the size of ToD, multiple teams can require access to the corporate domain portfolio for a variety of reasons. Whether the task at hand is registering new domains for a marketing campaign, accessing invoices for accounting, or updating a domain’s contact information, granting personnel access to the entire corporate domain portfolio poses a major security risk.

For ToD, it was important to find a domain management platform that could securely accommodate the needs of multiple teams. By allowing them to assign user roles that grant varying degrees of access depending on the user, ToD was able to ensure that team members can have access to key information, while maintaining the security of the domain portfolio.

Given that a cornerstone of ToD’s success is understanding that each client and engagement has its own unique requirements and working preferences, having a dedicated account manager to serve as a consistent point for their domain portfolio, ensuring continuity and close integration with their team was important to them. Not only would Traction on Demand be receiving strategic advice and recommendations, but those recommendations would be coming from someone familiar with their goals, projects, personnel and processes.

Describe the Experience of Migrating your Services to Webnames Corporate?

The process of transferring their domain names and DNS settings over to Webnames Corporate was meticulously planned and seamlessly executed according to Mike Cillis, IT Systems Architect at Traction on Demand. Working closely with their new account manager, ToD’s domains were strategically migrated over a couple of days, with no downtime or disruption of services.

Precision timing and technical diligence was applied to the migration of core properties, with everything taking place during off hours and followed by careful testing to ensure each domain was functioning as expected. Except for coordinating timelines, the process was largely hands-off and required minimal participation from ToD’s IT team with no disruption to their scheduled projects.

What Benefits Have You Experienced Working with Webnames Corporate?

Several months after transitioning to Webnames Corporate, Traction on Demand continues to experience gains in efficiency through a combination of delegating certain updates to their dedicated account manager and using powerful bulk tools to process renewals and updates across their large portfolio.

Arguably, the biggest game changer has been how Webnames’ proprietary domain management platform has enabled ToD team members to utilize secure multi-user access with advanced user-roles to minimize common security risks associated with sharing log-in credentials. This feature has helped simplify domain management for multiple ToD teams, while allowing their IT staff to maintain full visibility over every action, update, or change made in the corporate domain account.