Since the pandemic reshaped how Abbott hosts and engages its audiences, the company has leaned into hybrid experiences that let delegates meet in person while others join virtually through video and audio channels. As the number of virtual events grew, Abbott's operations team struggled to maintain a separate deployment pipeline for each vendor's implementation, and ASCENDING was brought in to standardize the process and keep those events running smoothly.
Background
Abbott is a global healthcare leader serving 160 countries, with a portfolio of life-changing technologies spanning diagnostics, medical devices, nutrition, and branded generic medicines. When the pandemic forced Abbott's important live conferences online, the company needed those virtual events to stay highly interactive, available, and engaging rather than becoming a diminished substitute for in-person gatherings.
At the end of 2020, ASCENDING became Abbott's primary cloud technology partner for transforming live conferences into cloud-based virtual events, piloting features such as calendar management, Single Sign-On (SSO) integration, video chat, gamification, and traffic reporting.
The Challenge
Abbott's shift to hybrid and virtual events introduced both a technology problem and an operational one.
- Abbott needed a hybrid approach that preserved the interactivity of live speakers and presenters while adding quality video, audio, and digital content, easy registration, engagement metrics, and post-event follow-up.
- A growing number of virtual events made it increasingly difficult for Abbott's operations team to maintain a separate deployment pipeline for each vendor's implementation.
- ASCENDING was tasked with standardizing the application build, packaging, testing, and deployment processes across those implementations.
Why ASCENDING
Abbott recognized that this challenge had two major components: the underlying technology, and the operational know-how to run live events well. ASCENDING, a cloud-computing service provider and Advanced AWS-certified partner, joined forces with ADM Production, the premier vendor for hosting live conferences and events for Fortune 100 companies, to bring both pieces together.
That partnership gave Abbott a team that understood both the cloud infrastructure needed to support interactive virtual events and the practical realities of producing live events at scale, making ASCENDING and ADM Production the right team for the transformation.
The Solution
Beyond delivering individual virtual events from planning through release, ASCENDING acted as a cloud technology enabler, building backend infrastructure that other Abbott teams could reuse for SSO, co-browser video chat, deployment pipelines, and analytics dashboards in future events.
- ASCENDING followed cloud best practices for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automating the entire deployment process through native cloud tooling rather than relying on manual, vendor-specific steps.
- Key operational points were documented for unexpected situations, and an automated deployment pipeline template was implemented and demonstrated to Abbott as a test case.
- ASCENDING designed and documented a full incident management process for live virtual events, including a 24x7 live support rotation plan, email and phone support, an online troubleshooting process, and a hotfix process.
- The resulting playbook and deployment process were shared across Abbott's technology partners so every vendor could build against the same standardized pipeline.
The Outcome
The standardized deployment pipeline and incident management playbook gave Abbott's operations team the ability to run virtual events independently while reducing risk and cost across every technology partner involved.
- Abbott's operations team can now follow the ASCENDING playbook to support live events on its own.
- All technology partners use the same standardized deployment process to automate their builds, reducing operational costs and mitigating security risks.
- A documented 24x7 incident management process keeps live virtual events supported around the clock.
- Reusable cloud infrastructure for SSO, video chat, and analytics dashboards now speeds up planning for future Abbott events.
Technology Used"We are happy to see a high registration of attendants; it's all about utilizing the right technology and staying focused on the appealing factor of our event. ASCENDING helped us leverage all the right channels and allowed us to offer a personalized relationship with our audience. Thanks to the technical team for ensuring that our event was interactive, one of a kind, and successful." — Abbott
