21CS rebuilt its website on HubSpot CMS with a refreshed brand and nine templates
The Customer
21CS makes mainframe software. The company is an IBM partner and, by its own account, the only independent software vendor apart from IBM that develops a mainframe operating system. Its products run at the operating system level, where a failure costs far more than a crashed app.
One key thing I forgot to mention, probably around our unique skills, is that we are the only mainframe ISV (other than IBM) that develops a mainframe operating system (VSEn). This matters as an operating system requires much more system level knowledge and attention to quality - it’s one thing if you app fails, but if an operating system fails you are in real trouble.
Eddy, 21CS
In 2025 the company engaged Lynton to redesign the site on HubSpot CMS, starting with discovery in June.
The Challenge
The team at 21CS wanted to take some design and content risks. Their market is one where few vendors try to stand out, and they saw that as an opening. The new site had to look like a modern software house in an industry most buyers see as traditional.
They also wanted a new look without a new logo. The brief asked for fresh brand colors and a new typeface, with the existing logo kept as it was.
The product story is technical. An operating system, a cloud data product and several utilities each needed a page that explains the problem it solves, shows its specifications and points a buyer to the next step. The site also needed a proper home for the technical resources and blog posts the company had built up.
They also wanted the site live quickly, so the plan was to launch the core pages first and add the rest afterward.
The Solution
We started with discovery. That covered a discovery brief and review of the current site, sitemap recommendations based on Google Analytics data, a competitor analysis of BMC, Broadcom, Rocket Software and Precisely, and a site architecture document that recommended the templates to build.
The brand refresh happened inside the redesign. We presented refreshed blues and purples and two font options, and the client chose the first palette and Plus Jakarta Sans.
We then designed and built nine templates on top of Lynton’s Starter Theme for HubSpot. The global pieces came first: styles, a header with a mega menu whose Solutions panel can pull in the most recent blog post, a footer and a search results page. The homepage template combines a hero, a related resources section, a text and media block with an overlapping gradient call to action, a logo grid and a product slider.
The About template carries a company timeline, a location map with tooltips for the company’s offices, a values section, a masonry photo gallery, contact details and a LinkedIn feed in place of hand-posted news. The 21CS Difference template adds statistics, testimonial styles, feature items and a photo grid.
The product detail template serves VSEn, STRATUSn and the rest of the line. It pairs a Challenge and Solution module with “Up Next” stepping, tabbed content, a video section, a solutions slider, related products and a product specifications module with two table layouts, one of which holds the VSEn release chart. A flexible Solutions template, a “Talk to a Mainframe Expert” landing page with its lead form, and blog listing and post templates with category filters, featured posts and social sharing round out the page types. The Resources page runs on a HubDB table we set up, filterable by content type, with a video modal that plays YouTube, Vimeo or native video.
Alongside the templates we wrote the first drafts of the homepage, STRATUSn and 21CS Difference copy from a subject matter expert interview, and built a marketing email template. We migrated the blog with the platform’s site importer, cleaned up tags and placed calls to action. Content entry ran in two batches across up to 15 pages, with stock images and a custom icon library.
The MVP went live on September 22, 2025, under 16 weeks after the June kickoff, with redirects and the cookie policy in place. The remaining pages were published and added to the navigation in November. The client received documentation for every template and a one-hour training session.
What They Got
The 21CS marketing team now runs the whole site in their CRM’s editor. Every page type has a template with modules they can rearrange, so a new product page or landing page is a content task.
The Resources library grows from a table. Adding a white paper, video or guide means adding a row, and the filters and video player take care of the rest. The blog lives on the same platform as their forms and contacts, with featured posts and category filters the team controls.
The brand refresh gave them a palette and typeface that fit the company they are, with the logo their customers already know.
Wrapping Up
On this job the standard was to get the core of the site live early and finish the rest without stalling. Launching the MVP first, then publishing the second phase of pages in November, let the client show the new brand while the long tail of content was still being written.
Lynton now builds AI-native websites on open infrastructure; see our current work at /case-studies.