About Infobip
Infobip was founded in 2006 by Silvio Kutic in Vodnjan, a small town on Croatia’s Istria peninsula. It now employs more than 2,000 people and operates in more than 65 offices worldwide. The service covers more than 7 billion mobile devices in more than 190 countries, connects to more than 800 telecom networks and reaches more than 5 billion people.
Infobip now serves 250,000 businesses, including Google, Uber and Twitter. This means that there’s a good chance that any SMS captcha you receive or an instant message from another platform was sent through Infobip’s cloud communications platform.
Infobip, which started as a messaging service, is positioning itself as a smarter SaaS provider as communication forms change and communication scenarios expand.
Infobip ADAPTS its cloud communications platform to meet changing consumer preferences, technology and compliance requirements in more than 200 countries. Adapting to so many changes and maintaining this exponential growth is enough to make most teams feel overwhelmed. But Infobip, with the help of Atlassian Data Center and more advanced DevOps and ITSM practices, has steadily increased deployment speed, reduced problem-solving time from days to minutes, and helped two-thirds of the world’s population communicate effectively with confidence.
Fast-changing customer needs, regulations and technology are pushing businesses to adapt faster and more often than ever before. Add in big events like the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pace of change goes from rapid to rapid, sometimes overnight.
The agile transition has helped many organizations adopt more flexible processes so that they can keep up with the pace of change. But to thrive — not just survive — in the face of adversity, they must also modernise their mindset and technology.
Companies like Infobip are outstanding examples of this type of agile enterprise, as evidenced by their billion-dollar + valuation. More than 5 billion people worldwide use Infobip’s cloud communications platform, either directly or through service providers. (Infobip is directly connected to more than 650 carriers worldwide.) The platform provides messaging services to more than 750 banks and some of the world’s leading blue-chip companies, social networks, technology companies and aggregators, as well as some of the world’s most commonly used communication systems, such as Viber and WhatsApp.
Infobip has achieved its impressive impact by adapting to the consumer preferences, technology and compliance requirements of each country/region they serve. When a customer in Japan said, “We want our users to be able to send emails to 17 different countries and they need to automatically delete them after an hour,” Infobip replied, “No problem.” When another customer in Ghana said, “We want users to be able to send USSD messages (the forerunner of SMS) anywhere, including in Europe, where there is a GDPR requirement for data privacy,” Infobip replied, “We can do that for you.”
Infobip uses Atlassian Data Center solutions and more modern DevOps and ITSM practices to standardize like an enterprise while maintaining the pace of growth of a start-up. By focusing on Atlassian for product development, event management, and change management, the team steadily increased deployment speed while reducing problem resolution time from days to minutes. Infobip now has the infrastructure they need to sustain their rapid growth and deliver the infrastructure their customers need better and faster than ever before.
The challenges of rapid growth have stimulated the need for more integrated solutions
When Infobip was founded in 2006 in a small town in Croatia, its focus was on helping local businesses authenticate customers using SMS. At the time it was fairly easy to track tasks, projects and problems, but as they spread to other parts of Europe, then to Asia and Africa, and then to Latin America and the United States, they began to suffer from the obvious challenges of rapid growth. To more effectively continue its phenomenal growth and maintain compliance across many industries and regions, Infobip needs to centralize its systems and workflows.
The team chose to use Atlassian Server for standardization in 2012 because of its reputation as an integrated system for product, project, and IT service management. After implementing Jira Software and Bitbucket for development and continuous deployment, Infobip added Jira Service Management for internal ticketing and Confluence as a knowledge hub for technical and non-technical teams. Departments across the organization are starting to use Atlassian to track goals and key results, team activities, documentation, best practices, and more.
Since Jira Software was first introduced, developers have expanded its application to portfolio management beyond product development. “We’re not just thinking about features, Epic and user stories, but also the product portfolio so we can prioritize what’s important,” said Damir Prusac, vp of engineering. Today, product development relies on Jira Software to form product policies and translate them into requirements. Developers then use the same solution to develop, test, and support products built based on these requirements, and deploy them from Bitbucket each time.
Bitbucket also facilitates compliance. “The first thing auditors ask is how do you track changes,” says Renato Klarić, site reliability manager. “Jira and Bitbucket are linked together to show details and changes in the production environment. It’s trackable, so they know what we’re doing and when to deploy.”
Billions of people use its products every day, so there is no room for risk. The team relies on SonarQube tests to proactively find bugs and vulnerabilities, plus Canary tests to verify new releases prior to release. By conducting in-depth testing at multiple stages of the product life cycle, Infobip can have confidence in product quality and compliance.
Expand DevOps with new practices and partnerships
In recent years, R&D has focused on increasing knowledge sharing and reducing administrative burdens. “Before, we were a team, but there was a separation between hardware and software, front end and back end,” Renato said. “We had to do a lot of things back and forth between these teams, which hindered the speed and agile development we needed.”
To overcome these challenges, Infobip divides large engineering departments into teams by function, including monitoring, infrastructure, automation, continuous improvement, and development, so that they can focus their efforts. Make it work faster. They also partnered with solution partner venITure to launch LeSS, a framework specifically created for multiple teams to work together to create a product to extend Infobip’s Scrum practices and provide greater transparency to management. With this framework, each team now has the freedom to choose their own process and set up their own workflow in Jira Software and Bitbucket. Managers then standardize these workflows at a higher level so that developers can collaborate across teams and work more efficiently on a large scale.
Streamlining its workflow and adopting modern DevOps practices has paid off, while laying the foundation for its future. “As the organization grows, the number of deployments increases,” Damir said. Keeping the deployment rate per developer high helps us stay agile.”
Use Jira Service Management to reduce problem occurrence and resolve problems faster
As developers adapt their processes to extend product development, support is doing the same for ITSM. A few years ago, Infobip had a Network Operations Center (NOC) monitoring their infrastructure to maintain peace of mind, but all the alerts were overwhelming and frustrating. “We might have 25,000 alerts,” Renato recalls, “and you’d have to go through each one to see what was going on. Only one person tells you what the real problem is, and the rest tell you what happened.”
To reduce alarms and improve response times, while improving team morale, Infobip integrated Jira Service Management into their Atlassian solution. Event management through Opsgenie has proven to be a secure safeguard for monitoring and on-call alerts. “Previously, it was complicated to figure out who to call when we or our customers detected a problem, and it took time to manually call the right person to explain the situation. “Jira Service Management helps us get the right people online at the right time to deal with problems,” Renato said.
Whenever the support department or NOC reports an incident, Jira Service Management triggers an alarm and notifies the engineer on duty. Team members then start a new thread in a dedicated Event management Slack channel to work together to resolve the problem and coordinate client communication with support staff.
Once the incident is resolved, the team will conduct a post-mortem review, record their findings and changes in Confluence, and link the incident to the Jira Software fault list for follow-up tasks. Change-related tasks are marked and tracked in Jira Software, and pull requests in Bitbucke T link to Jira Software for more context information about the changes. Developers can deploy basic configuration changes without approval, while more important changes require an additional level of review by the architect.
With more structured event and change management processes and better systems to support them, Infobip found that the time to deal with and fix problems was reduced. “In the beginning, it might take three days to turn off the alarm. Now it takes an average of three minutes from seeing an alert to turning it off and then dealing with the problem.” Renato said. “We also saw fewer incidents with older products and improved repair times.”
Upgrade integration for stability and efficiency
As Infobip expanded from a small office in Croatia to more than 65 offices worldwide and 39 data centers worldwide, they faced another common challenge for growing multinationals: minimizing management while maximizing stability and efficiency. With venITure’s support, upgrading to Atlassian Data Center helps improve uptime and performance while reducing maintenance burdens, allowing them to focus on scaling and innovation.
“We chose to migrate to Data Center because we wanted to ensure greater stability and continued uptime and long-term sustainability with our Atlassian solution,” Damir said. Feedback from developers since the upgrade has been very positive, with high availability being one of the biggest improvements.
Infobip also integrates multiple Marketplace applications to further save time and cost, Damir notes: “Insight is important to keep software licensed and predictable and planning on costs.” “We’ve also integrated a solution that makes it easy to track OKR progress, and our integration with Salesforce through Atlassian is becoming increasingly important for tracking parts of the sales process.”
“If it doesn’t help our customers, we won’t do it.”
Two thirds of the world’s population in nearly 200 countries are now using Infobip, and standardization and scaling with Atlassian Data Center has proven to be a necessity rather than a luxury.
“The changes in every country and region are dynamic. We need to accommodate many different Settings so that our customers are free to choose how they want to deliver messages. If you don’t do it in an automated way, it’s very tricky.” Damir said. “Each country and region also has many privacy and security requirements, such as the GDPR. “Meeting all these different requirements requires a lot of infrastructure and constant interaction with our customers.”
VenITure has played a key role in helping Infobip adapt to these changes, and they continue to collaborate on how to take Infobip’s processes and platform to the next level. “VenITure has always been an ideal partner for us. It’s not just about software licensing, it’s about marketing consulting and building new channels.” Damir said.
VenITure’s Kristijan Luburic added that the two companies are currently working together to launch Atlassian Marketplace, The application integrates the Jira Service Management Cloud with the Infobip API, so customers can use any channel of the Infobip Service (WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, etc.) to communicate with users in more ways.
And for Infobip, that’s what it’s all about: building meaningful customer relationships by easily interacting with the channels people choose. “Everything we do is to serve our customers. If it doesn’t help the customer, we don’t do it.” Damir said. “It’s about improving processes throughout the organization… We try to integrate all of our teams and services while maintaining compliance. Atlassian has helped us tremendously in this process by helping us connect everyone and everything together.”