Smith Drug Company moved two business-critical pharmaceutical wholesale portals to Jahia, preserving its existing Angular applications, avoiding an 8x license renewal increase, and maintaining stable operations through its daily 5-8 PM ordering peak.
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Smith Drug operates two e-commerce platforms. SmithDrug.com is the flagship portal, serving customers from the Mississippi River to the East Coast through four distribution centers. IntegralRx serves a nationwide customer base through UPS shipping and focuses on generics.
The portals support customer ordering, account access, sales support, help desk visibility, and technical administration. New pharmacy customers also go through a week-long onboarding process that includes DEA verification, state license checks, and credit review.
For Smith Drug, the portal is not just a digital channel. It is part of the operating model behind next-day delivery.
Smith Drug’s previous portal environment created two pressures at once.
The first was cost. The renewal proposal from the previous portal provider would have increased the annual license cost by a factor of eight. Smith Drug needed a credible alternative that could keep platform spend aligned with its existing budget.
The second was content autonomy. Business teams could not update important portal content on their own. Time-sensitive notices such as drug recalls, return restrictions, shortage alerts, manufacturer copay information, drop-ship links, and holiday messages all required developer intervention.
The technical constraint was just as important. Smith Drug already had Angular applications supporting its commerce experience. Rebuilding them would have added time, risk, and cost. The team needed a platform that could fit into the existing architecture.
Jahia’s proof of concept showed that Smith Drug could migrate without starting from a blank slate. The existing Angular applications could be integrated into Jahia with minimal changes, allowing the team to preserve the commerce functionality already used by customers and internal teams.
Smith Drug deployed Jahia on premise, consistent with its infrastructure strategy and on-premise ERP. Keeping the portal close to the ERP avoided unnecessary latency between systems that communicate frequently.
The implementation began in April 2025. SmithDrug.com went live in March 2026, and IntegralRx was substantially migrated by the May 2026. The two portal migrations were run in parallel and completed in approximately 13 months.
For developers, Jahia’s packaging structure was close enough to existing practices to avoid a major reset. Once the team learned the new patterns, nightly deployments became easier to manage.
So far it’s been very stable. We’ve not had any issues.
— Steve Semothy, Lead Developer, Smith Drugs
Since go-live, Smith Drug reported no outages attributable to Jahia and no incidents during the 5 to 8 PM ordering window. For a business where downtime can immediately affect order capture, stability is the proof point that matters most.
The team now deploys almost every night, with a process described as easier than before. The migration did not force a full application rewrite or a practice reset.
Smith Drug also contained platform cost by avoiding the announced eightfold renewal increase from its previous portal provider.
Two B2B commerce portals migrated in approximately 13 months.
Existing Angular applications preserved without a full rewrite.
No Jahia-related outages reported after go-live.
Daily deployments are easier for the development team.
Platform spend contained despite an announced 8x renewal increase.
Marketing autonomy prepared as the next operational phase.
The team plans to move additional public-facing properties and post-login informational pages into Jahia so marketing can manage more content directly. That includes product updates, operational notices, and recurring content that currently depends on IT.
For enterprise teams evaluating a CMS or DXP migration, Smith Drug’s story shows a practical path: protect business continuity first, preserve existing applications where they still create value, and create a foundation that both IT and business teams can use.
Final CTA
Planning a portal or CMS migration where business continuity matters? Request a Jahia demo to see how Jahia supports complex digital ecosystems with enterprise CMS, DXP, hybrid publishing, and open integration capabilities.
The free assessment produces an inventory of your components and pages, an estimate of the automated and assisted scope, a first visible result in Jahia in 45 minutes, and an evaluation of third-party integrations and key considerations.