ACO's Global TYPO3 Multisite Platform Powers 125+ Websites Across 50 Countries

ACO Ahlmann SE & Co. KG is one of the world's leading water technology companies, specializing in rainwater and wastewater management solutions. With 5,300 employees worldwide and operations in over 50 countries, ACO embodies its mission "ACO. we care for water" through innovative separation and filter technologies that prevent water contamination from fats, fuels, heavy metals, and microplastics.

Founded in 1946 in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, this family corporation has built its reputation on durability, sustainability, and environmental responsibility. When ACO needed a robust digital infrastructure to support its global presence, they partnered with dkd Internet Service GmbH, a TYPO3 specialist agency, to create and maintain a comprehensive multisite ecosystem that could scale with their worldwide operations.

In 2011, ACO faced a critical challenge: how to maintain consistent brand presence and functionality across dozens of international markets while allowing for local customization. Their existing TYPO3 setup lacked the development infrastructure and automation needed to efficiently manage multiple websites across different regions, languages, and business units.

The company needed more than just a technology upgrade—they required a strategic partner who could help architect a scalable solution, establish efficient development processes, and provide ongoing expertise to support their global ambitions. The goal was clear: create a unified digital platform that could deliver consistency at scale while maintaining the flexibility to meet diverse regional requirements.

TYPO3 was the natural choice for ACO's ambitious multisite project, building on their existing familiarity with the platform since 2011. The CMS's inherent multisite capabilities, combined with its extensibility and enterprise features, made it ideal for managing complexity at scale.

The solution architecture leverages TYPO3's core strengths, including a unified base system enabling centralized feature deployment across all instances, flexible content elements (30+ custom types) allowing creative freedom within brand guidelines, a robust testing framework with 1,500+ unit tests and many functional tests ensuring stability, and multi-language support handling 30+ languages seamlessly.

An ACO stakeholder commented: "After we received the TYPO3 system and a short introduction to build up our new website, it was very intuitive to work inside this content management system. Despite many content elements and features, we are able to build up our pages very quickly and easily. TYPO3 makes it possible for us to work with more than five people in our project."

The project operates through a dedicated Scrum team of 10 professionals from both ACO and dkd, working in two-week sprints to continuously evolve the platform. This collaborative approach ensures rapid response to stakeholder needs while maintaining system stability across the entire network.

Automated Multisite Management
The cornerstone of the solution is a sophisticated base system that automates feature rollouts to all 150+ instances. This approach ensures consistency while dramatically reducing deployment time and effort. New features, security updates, and improvements can be deployed globally with minimal manual intervention.

Tailored Editor Experience
Each website instance receives a customized package of extensions and features based on specific regional needs. Through detailed briefings, the team determines the optimal toolset for each stakeholder, ensuring editors aren't overwhelmed while having access to all necessary functionality. This includes specialized training programs for new TYPO3 users.

Continuous Innovation and Quality Assurance
With 100+ website extensions and comprehensive testing coverage, the platform maintains enterprise-grade reliability. The integration with ACO's Product Information Management (PIM) system streamlines product data management across all sites, ensuring accurate and up-to-date information worldwide.

Key Technical Achievements include responsive design ensuring optimal experience across all devices, PIM integration to automatically import and update approximately 100,000 products in TYPO3, SEO optimization driving organic traffic growth, and GDPR compliance meeting data privacy regulations across all markets.

The impact of this TYPO3 multisite solution has revolutionized ACO's digital operations. International partners can now request and receive fully functional, corporate-compliant websites within days rather than months. This dramatic reduction in time-to-market has enabled ACO to rapidly expand its digital presence while maintaining brand consistency.

The platform's near-zero downtime record across all sites demonstrates the robustness of the solution, while the ability to manage 30+ languages from a single system has simplified international content management. The unified approach has not only improved operational efficiency but has also enhanced transparency and solution-oriented communication across ACO's global network.

Throughout this decade-long partnership, the project has generated numerous contributions to the TYPO3 ecosystem, including bug fixes, new features for TYPO3 Core, and various extension improvements. Team members have shared their learnings through presentations at TYPO3 conferences and T3DD, helping advance the platform's multisite capabilities for the entire community.

After 13 years of continuous evolution, the ACO-dkd partnership stands as a testament to TYPO3's enterprise capabilities and the power of collaborative development. The platform continues to grow, with new sites regularly added to the network and ongoing improvements ensuring it remains at the cutting edge of digital technology.

This case study demonstrates that with the right approach, it's possible to provide more than 50 countries with a unified CMS platform while accommodating individual market needs, proving that TYPO3 can scale to meet even the most demanding global enterprise requirements.