Exterro was founded in 2006 with the vision that applying the concepts of process optimisation and data science to how companies manage digital information and respond to litigation would drive more successful outcomes at a lower cost. With software solutions that span privacy, legal operations, compliance, cybersecurity and information governance, Exterro helps some of the world’s largest organizations work smarter and more efficiently.
Exterro Highlights
Environment
100+ Developers
1 release per week
50 commits/week
Tools
Git, Bitbucket, SVN
Jenkins, Bamboo
Puppet
Bolt
JUnit, TestNG, Selenium
Custom scripts and utilities
Challenge
Shashidhar Angadi, Exterro’s CTO and twenty-five year industry veteran, was faced with a difficult challenge—how to efficiently scale development across Exterro’s diverse and growing list of projects.
Due to a combination of rapid organic growth and recent acquisitions, Exterro has multiple business units, development teams, products and toolchains. These conditions, common in enterprise organizations, made it impossible for Angadi and his teams to get the accurate and timely information they needed to drive development productivity and efficiently plan and optimize development processes. Furthermore, this complexity placed increasing demand on hard-to-hire DevOps resources and made it difficult to efficiently scale development teams. As Angadi put it, “Good DevOps engineers are hard to find and we were stretched really thin.”
Prakash Sevanan, Exterro’s DevOps team lead, was living with this complexity every day; the multiplicity of teams, processes and tools put a lot of pressure on the DevOps team. “Not having tools that could span all our pipelines and projects meant that we had to have expert DevOps resources for every tool chain. And, since no one outside of DevOps had access to dev pipeline status, we had to report everything manually.”
Solution
For the first phase of their enterprise-wide CloudBees Release Orchestration SaaS rollout, Exterro focused on their industry-leading E-Discovery Data Management (EDDM) product. End-to-end CloudBees Release Orchestration SaaS functionality for EDDM required Importing three pre-existing pipelines and integrating several third party tools, including:
SVN
Jenkins
Puppet/Bolt
Selenium/JUnit Tests
Several custom applications and scripts
“Development productivity is up and we now have end-to-end visibility across our projects.”
- Shashidhar Angadi - CTO
“CloudBees Release Orchestration SaaS delivered a single, integrated platform that we used to import our existing pipelines, build new ones and report on all of them.”
- Prakash Sevanan - DevOps Lead
Results
CTO Shashidhar Angadi now has the ability to quickly and accurately establish status across teams, products and business units. Development productivity is up , executive reporting is vastly simplified and, most importantly, Angadi has the information he and his teams need to drive continuous productivity and quality improvement. And CloudBees Release Orchestration SaaS has helped Exterro manage their way through a global pandemic. As Angadi puts it, “During the times of COVID-19 with everyone working remote Release IQ has been extremely helpful for all the managers in the organization as it makes it easier to track commits and code changes” And, thanks to CloudBees Release Orchestration SaaS’s ability to import pre-existing pipelines, implementation was fast and easy. And now DevOps is able to provide all teams self-service access to consistent status information while maintaining existing training investments. Training is now much simpler and everyone has easy access to the same accurate and timely status.
“Implementing CloudBees Release Orchestration SaaS was easy and the impact was immediate—now we have the information we need to fix process bottlenecks, improve quality and drive productivity."
- VP of Engineering - AIOps Team
“Having a single, easy-to-learn tool makes hiring and training DevOps team members much easier.”
- Senior DevOps Engineer - AIOps Team