How A Composable Platform is Driving Digital Efficiency for TELUS
How Canada’s largest telecommunications company has been able to streamline operations, reduce development costs, and significantly improve efficiency across its digital properties with a modern commerce platform.
In 2016, TELUS found itself at a crossroads. At the time, they were operating with multiple CMS platforms—both internal custom builds and third-party solutions—which made managing content across its various brands a costly and inefficient endeavor. And as device types and channels were shifting (roughly 60-70% of its traffic at the time was coming from mobile devices), the company needed a content solution that would enable them to deliver content to any device type or channel with ease.
“We had three internal CMSs at the time, plus external systems like dotCMS and Drupal,” said Nika Karliuchenko, Senior Technical Product Manager at TELUS. “Each system was used in isolation, and none of them communicated well with one another. It became the land of broken toys.”
The distributed nature of the CMSs resulted in various technical and operational challenges. Different teams used different programming languages (Java, Ruby, PHP, JavaScript), creating silos that hindered collaboration and increased the cost of maintenance. Design tokens and systems weren’t standardized across teams, further compounding the problem.
Recognizing that maintaining this disparate architecture was unsustainable, TELUS’s Chief Digital Officer initiated a search for a better way. Enter MACH technologies.
Building a Foundation with Contentful
As part of their transformation, TELUS adopted Contentful as their headless CMS to unify content management across web and mobile platforms. This choice allowed TELUS to embrace an API-first, cloud-native architecture, which helped consolidate content management and reduce operational inefficiencies.
“Contentful was selected as the CMS to rule them all,” said Karliuchenko. “Over the last several years, Contentful has allowed us to manage content across multiple channels efficiently. It's become the backbone of our content strategy.”
One of the key benefits of moving to Contentful was its headless nature, which provided the flexibility needed to share content across TELUS’s web and mobile properties. Additionally, migrating to technologies like Node.js and React helped streamline development by creating reusable components and reducing duplication of effort.
“We created an internal starter kit with design systems and Contentful wired up, which was key to moving everyone forward into a cloud-native, API-first world,” Karliuchenko explained.
The Next Step: Integrating Uniform
Despite initial gains from Contentful, the TELUS team was still operating in silos, building components like banners, carousels, and cards independently, which resulted in code bloat and inefficiencies. The need for a more streamlined, composable approach sent TELUS searching for a complementary solution to their single-source-of-truth CMS— a search that led them to Uniform.
“By 2019, we still had this fragmented way of working,” Karliuchenko shared. “Even though we had a headless CMS and React, each team was building components in isolation, which created an enormous development challenge. That's when we adopted Uniform to solve challenges with content and component reuse.”
Uniform enabled TELUS to take their composable approach further by providing non-technical users with the ability to create authorable components—pieces of UI that could be built and managed without developer support. These components would connect to Contentful, which would remain TELUS’s central content hub, but could be applied in different layouts across various digital properties.
“Uniform introduced us to this concept of authorable components,” said Karliuchenko. “Marketers can now build components for mobile and web without needing any development experience. This allows our developers to focus on higher-priority tasks like security and performance.”
Advantages of Uniform in Action
The advantages of adopting Uniform became quickly apparent. Non-technical users at TELUS could now design, configure, and launch components without the need for extensive developer resources. Uniform’s low-code/no-code solution allowed for the creation of atomic design components that marketers and designers could use to craft new UI patterns with ease.
“Uniform allows us to create reusable patterns that can be applied across multiple applications,” Nika explained. “For example, the same banner design can be used across different brands with just a few clicks. It’s reduced the development workload significantly.”
This shift allowed TELUS’s developers to focus on more complex technical challenges, like performance optimization and security, while enabling marketers to quickly react to business needs by creating and deploying new content layouts themselves.
Uniform’s composable DXP also gave TELUS the flexibility to integrate their various systems. By grabbing content from Contentful and supporting frameworks like Next.js and React, Uniform allowed TELUS to build custom layouts while maintaining Contentful as the single source of truth for content.
A Future Built on MACH Technology
The integration of MACH-based solutions, including Uniform and Contentful, has provided TELUS with a foundation that allows for flexibility, scalability, and operational efficiency. Today, the company uses a variety of tools—including Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for hosting, Uniform for experience and orchestration, and Contentful for content management—all seamlessly integrated into a composable ecosystem.
As TELUS continues its digital transformation, it’s exploring further ways to optimize its technology stack. Additionally, TELUS is working to streamline its content strategy by optimizing their Contentful spaces and cleaning up content types for greater consistency.
“The journey is ongoing,” Karliuchenko said. “We’re working to clean up our content organization and continue evolving our personalization strategy. The flexibility of our MACH-based architecture gives us the freedom to swap out tools as our needs change without disrupting our overall strategy.”
Conclusion
TELUS’s journey toward composable commerce, driven by MACH-based technologies like Contentful and Uniform, demonstrates the power of a flexible, scalable digital architecture. By adopting a composable approach, TELUS has been able to reduce inefficiencies, empower non-technical users, and future-proof its digital strategy.
For businesses looking to modernize their digital infrastructure, TELUS’s experience serves as a compelling case study in the advantages of composable commerce and MACH technologies. As Karliuchenko summarized, “Without MACH technology, we wouldn’t be where we are today.”
Nika Karliuchenko will be speaking at an upcoming Power of MACH event in Toronto on Nov 7th, 2024.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.