Press Release

ThoughtWorks and the Guardian partner on award-winning website migration

28 Feb 2008 - London, England - Global IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, is working with Guardian News & Media (GNM) to migrate guardian.co.uk from its legacy technical environment to a new bespoke, flexible and future-proof Java-based platform built by the ThoughtWorks and Guardian team. This month's launch of the News, Politics and Observer sites was the latest and largest milestone in this collaboration. More than three quarters of guardian.co.uk's traffic is now served from the new platform.

Tom Turcan, General Manager, Digital, at GNM, says: "This new platform will play a significant part in helping us to achieve our ambition to be the world's leading liberal voice, it will also provide a flexible foundation for the Guardian's future web innovations. Throughout the process disruption for users has been minimal, and from a business perspective our traffic and revenue are growing strongly."

Benefits of the redesign include more flexible, intuitive navigation for the user. Advertising opportunities are also more flexible and contextual advertising enabled by the new platform is significantly increasing page yields and lifting sales.

The improved platform also brings a number of functional and technical benefits: separating content management from presentation, eliminating duplicated content, and allowing community and multimedia features to be rolled out across the site.

As the Guardian's principal technical partner ThoughtWorks has brought development expertise to the project and the latest Agile methodologies into the company, helping to embed them into its development culture. As a result the project has run on time and in budget and has delivered against business objectives.

ThoughtWorks has provided a wide range of consultants, including Project Managers, Business Analysts, Quality Analysts and Java Developers, comprising more than half of the 50-strong development team.

Turcan adds: "We've been really impressed with the quality of the ThoughtWorkers, they have made a significant and valuable contribution to the project."

Dilraj Aujla, Head of Client Management at ThoughtWorks, concludes "Guardian News & Media has shown a tremendous vision for the future of Digital Media with this project. It has required dynamic execution, strong belief in wide technology choices including Open Source, and the application of the best technical talent to deliver. ThoughtWorks has integrated seamlessly with the Guardian technical teams and we feel extremely proud of the outcomes of the partnership".

About ThoughtWorks

ThoughtWorks, Inc. ([www.thoughtworks.com]) is a global IT consultancy providing systems development, consulting, and transformation services to Global 1000 companies. The company's pioneering approach, which includes industry-acclaimed Agile and Lean best practices, helps CIOs maximise investment performance across a portfolio of complex, business critical applications, while reducing time and risk. ThoughtWorks' 900 professionals serve clients from offices in Australia, Canada, China, India, the United Kingdom and the United States. ThoughtWorks Studios is the company's specialist product division, which develops the next generation of tools for bespoke software development.

About Guardian News and Media

Guardian News and Media publishes the Guardian and Observer newspapers and Guardian.co.uk, the UK's most popular newspaper website. Launched in 1999 Guardian.co.uk has been voted the best newspaper on the web at the Webby Awards for the past three years. The site recorded record traffic of 19.7 million unique users in January 08 (audited by ABCe), the highest-ever monthly user figure for a UK newspaper site

Unlike most media organisations which are owned by a proprietor or group of shareholders. The Guardian is owned by the Scott Trust, a unique form of media ownership in the UK, which secures the continuity and editorial independence of the Guardian. Not owned by shareholders, dictated to by a press baron or influenced by a political party, Guardian journalists are free to present the truth as they see it.

Contact:
Katy White, ThoughtWorks
Tel 020 7497 4517 / kwhite@thoughtworks.com

Sam Harrisingh, MS&L PR
Tel 020 7878 3137 / sam.harrisingh@mslpr.co.uk

Julie Taylor, Guardian News and Media
Tel 020 7 713 4087 / Julie.Taylor@guardian.co.uk