Hearing care group rebuilds global web platform on Next.js
Demant, a hearing healthcare and technology group operating since 1904, supports customers worldwide with hearing care products and services. As the company's customer base has expanded across regions, its frontend infrastructure needed to scale without compromising the end-user experience.
The company's previous architecture ran a traditional CMS setup hosted in Azure. Serving a global audience required large, complex regional data center deployments, and despite those investments, response times remained poor. Visitors to Demant's websites experienced slow page loads that the team could not resolve within the existing infrastructure.
Demant decided to isolate its frontend from the CMS runtime by moving to a headless setup. The goal was to avoid scaling and performance bottlenecks while keeping hosting costs in check. The team selected Next.js and Vercel, citing stability, feature completeness, and broad adoption among developers as deciding factors.
Rebuilding the platform from scratch
The migration meant building an entirely new platform. Demant's core web team led the initiative, with individual business units contributing frontend development work. Despite the scale of the overhaul, the transition went smoothly: developers found the switch to Next.js intuitive, helped by comprehensive documentation.
At the center of the new architecture is Sitecore, now used as a headless CMS. It integrates with a Next.js application extended through Sitecore's JSS SDK. To improve delivery performance, the setup takes advantage of Vercel's Edge Middleware, Image Optimization, and Edge Cache offerings.
Measured gains in cost and speed
Running on Vercel has reduced the cost of Demant's globally scaled hosting setup by 10x, while response times improved by more than 30x. Build times dropped from hours to minutes. Developers can now spin up new frontend applications without spending significant time provisioning infrastructure, making teams more independent.
The development workflow benefits from Preview Deployments, which the team uses to share work in progress with stakeholders and manage QA across environments. The successful rollout has since expanded beyond the core team: more than 200 websites across multiple Demant business units now run on the platform.
With the performance and scalability issues behind it, Demant's engineering organization has shifted focus to building new capabilities on the platform rather than managing infrastructure, supporting the company's continued work in hearing health technology.
