Case Study: Saint-Gobain achieves a self-service 'website factory', doubling daily users and halving servers with Liferay

Industrial group manages steady stream of ideas with robust portal

Saint-Gobain, a 350‑year‑old global industrial group with €42B revenue and 200,000 employees, needed to modernize its group intranet after its existing portal became outdated, slow (particularly in Asia) and inflexible. With maintenance expiring and strict deadlines, cost constraints and a desire to let business users create and manage content themselves, the Digital Solutions team sought a scalable, easy‑to‑use replacement that would reduce server overhead and improve user acceptance.

The team migrated to Liferay because it matched their requirements for usability, scalability, third‑party integration and open‑source flexibility, with strong online support for their India team. The result: a self‑service “website factory” with 255 sites, rapid user adoption and training, doubled portal traffic and 24,000 daily users, faster logins in Asia, a 50% reduction in servers, and migration costs recouped within a year—freeing the smaller support team to focus on higher‑value work.

Saint-Gobain

Edouard Joppé

Portal & Collaboration Services Manager, Digital Solutions Team