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March 07

Creativity and Innovation

The Blue Acacia Team

Honda Motorcycle France wanted a site that reflected their passion for quality and innovation. Blue Acacia, a Paris-based web development and interactive marketing services firm, knew how to help. Using .Net with XML and AJAX, Blue Acacia created a site featuring stunning visuals and cutting-edge design that shows off the company's advanced technology, yet loads quickly and is easy to modify. Going live at the 2007 Mondial des 2 roues show, the site received over 600,000 hits on the first day. The site stands ready to showcase a 3-D web application that will allow customers to build their own motorcycles when it is released in Spring 2008. This is their story.

A client with 3D vision
Honda Motorcycle France is a company that is passionate about quality and innovation. As the worldwide leader in motorcycles, they set the pace. They wanted to project an image that perfectly reflected that passion. Honda Motorcycle France's commitment to innovation is expressed in many ways. For example, they have, for many years, built motorcycles specially designed for the racing circuit and it actively participates in both the MotoGP and Formula One races. Their latest innovative idea was to use a 3-D web application that would allow customers to configure their own motorcycles, including parts and accessories.

Sebastien Pernel, Marketing Director for Honda Motorcycle France, wanted to fulfill that 3-D vision but, first, he needed a web site. This was going to be a tall order because Sebastien also wanted the ability to create mini-sites within the site that could be dedicated to new products. He also wanted to quickly add and remove specific pages for promotions, accessories, and the e-catalog. Finally, he needed someone who embraced innovation and welcomed a challenge to do the job. So he turned François Sutter and the team at Blue Acacia.

Making it happen
Blue Acacia provides web development and interactive marketing services. Honda Motorcycle France’s objectives were very ambitious and François liked that.

“Honda Motorcycle France is a company based on technical innovation. They built a motorcycle just to win the Paris-Dakar race and proceeded to win the race for several years,” says François.

Blue Acacia began by creating a new intranet for Honda Motorcycle France’s distributors. This gave over 200 distributors access to product information, price lists, and other helpful sales material. It was an overwhelming success. Sebastien then asked Blue Acacia to redesign a customer site for Honda Motorcycle France.

“The technical challenge was to build a site that was esthetically appealing and that Honda Motorcycle France could manage by itself and perform the updates in an autonomous way,” says Francois.

Keeping the business goals in mind, Blue Acacia built the site using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. The team leveraged both XML and Ajax to create pages that were easy for Honda Motorcycle France to change and fast to load. The new site also incorporates the 3D web application, which is scheduled to be released in the next couple of months.

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Blue Acacia believes in Microsoft products
Blue Acacia believes in Microsoft’s products. In fact, the whole staff is Microsoft certified, including one network administrator who has seven certifications.

“Some of our competitors use Linux because of the cost. While the Microsoft applications can seem expensive, in exchange you get a guarantee. Recently, we were migrating some applications and had some technical issues. It was great to have the Microsoft Support team behind us!” says Francois.

Honda Motorcycle France’s new site went live at the 2007 Mondial des 2 roues show to great acclaim. That day they had over 600,000 hits. There have been a number of articles in the press praising the Honda Motorcycle France design, and they are also receiving feedback from customers that the site is easy to use, fast to load, and attractive.

“We’re now working on a new project that we suggested to them,” says Francois. “It’s confidential, so I can’t talk about the details, but I can tell you they will be the first corporation ever to do this on the internet!”