Google App Engine Custom Development Case Study

App Engine Development Deep Dive Case Study White Stratus • 15 December 2010

White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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App Engine Development Case Study

Introduction App Engine Development White Stratus worked with Bright Green Projects using Google App Engine and Google Apps Marketplace to reduce costs and drive revenue growth.

Bright Green Projects is an emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor in the agile project management space. The Bright Green Project product is a simple agile project tool, founded on principles of Scrum and Lean Kanban. It gives project teams and their clients the freedom that comes from a transparent, well organized project. Today Bright Green Projects is a success story - it has a user base of more than 1000 customers, and has recently been featured by Google as one of the top 30 Enterprise Applications on the Google Apps marketplace 1. A significant part of Bright Green Projects success comes from a decision to collaborate with White Stratus in an effort to enhance the product functionality, streamline costs and tap into new markets. This deep-dive case study tells the story of the journey undertaken by White Stratus to achieve this success.

1 http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2010/11/google-apps-marketplace-project.html

White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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App Engine Development Case Study

The Challenge In the first half of 2010, like many software products in the ultracompetitive Software-as-a-Service industry, Bright Green faced an uphill battle: • How could they maintain margins where industry standard is below 5%? • What was the best way to quickly scale revenues without significantly driving up cost? • How could they cut development timelines? • How could they leverage technology to reduce monthly operating costs for their fast growing user base? Bright Green engaged the White Stratus Cloud Strategy team in a conversation around finding a solution to these challenges, and a clear solution emerged: Migrate the product to Google App Engine to manage costs and efficiency, and leverage the power of Google Apps Marketplace to reach a broader range of customers and deliver top line growth.

The Solution With a conceptual plan to leverage the power of Google the next step for White Stratus was to put together a detailed solution. It became apparent that there would be four key components necessary: Firstly, scalability. The solution would need to be suitable for Enterprise users who were running large distributed teams - up to 1000 users simultaneously. Furthermore, these teams would be White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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App Engine Development Case Study

distributed across multiple locations spanning countries, timezones and cultures. Secondly Integration. The solution would need to connect with other SaaS solutions to give a seamless experience for end users, across business processes such as payment and customer support. This seamless experience would also need to extend to the employees of Bright Green who would want connectivity with CRM applications. Thirdly Enhanced Functionality. There was a need to enhance the functionality of the Bright Green Projects tool to include advanced reporting capabilities, a more intuitive user interface and further tracking and access controls. Finally there was the need to maximize the benefits of Google Apps. This included not just taking advantage of the low-cost, scalable platform provided by App Engine, but also integrating into other Google based products such as Gmail and Calendar through Single Sign On (SSO) capabilities, as well as listing on the Google Apps marketplace.

“Engaging White Stratus to take us onto Google Apps was the best decision we made in 2010” Jim Barrymore, CFO, Bright Green Projects

The Approach Given the timeline limitations, an approach that delivered results quickly, without consuming large chunks of time or budget was needed. An iterative delivery method - complete with automated White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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App Engine Development Case Study

test scripts to allay concerns about increased testing costs clearly fit the bill. White Stratus deployed a team that had used our Agile Prototyping Method (APM) successfully on other cloud migration engagements. The White Stratus development team made some quick technology decisions - a JVM (java virtual machine) language so the application could be hosted on app engine, and Ruby on Rails for its versatility. “Deploying automated test scripts cut time to market in half allowing more time for high value tasks like User Experience” Jerome Riga, Product Development Lead, Bright Green Projects

Iterative sprints were planned on a 2-weekly basis, with the release of first-drop functionality after 4 sprints (2 months). First drop functionality was selected on the basis of maximum business benefit, and focused on access control and tracking, customer support functionality as well as billing and CRM integration. Post go live a team of pilot users was brought on board to perform load testing and User Experience testing and provide User Experience feedback.

A second release of 2 sprints was executed with key enhancements around user experience, and live support. A range of Google Apps capabilities was also deployed including: • • • •

Single sign-on with a user's Google Apps account Usage of the Google Big Table Data Store Automatic user account creation on first login Universal navigation with access to Bright Green from GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other Google Apps • Google Marketplace deployment. White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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App Engine Development Case Study

The Google Marketplace deployment was complemented with a digital marketing campaign that focused around marketplace listing, blog and article syndication and a targeted outbound campaign.

The Results The iterative development approach had allowed some redundant functionally to be dropped, saving scope and time, and the engagement was concluded in July 2010 after 3 months around 2 weeks ahead of initial estimates. As a result of moving the platform onto Google App Engine, monthly hosting costs for the software user base had declined by 28%. Furthermore, the time spent on application maintenance primarily database maintenance was cut by 35% per month. However the most significant results came not from cost reduction but from an increase in revenue and subscriptions, due to distribution through the Google Apps marketplace. Within 30 days of making the Bright Green Projects software available on Google Apps Marketplace, free trial registrations had increased by 250%. Within 60 days of go live software sales had increased by 300%. And within 6 months, the global install base of the Bright Green Projects software had

“We were amazed to see the impact of going live on Google Apps Marketplace. I woke up one morning to check the new accounts reports, and literally saw a huge spike” Emma Halifax, Office Manager Bright Green Projects.

White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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App Engine Development Case Study

increased by more than 17%.

Conclusion There is a lot of discussion around the benefits of using The Cloud to reduce business costs. Clearly cost reduction is a valid reason to pursue cloud related business transformation, and measurable cost reduction was achieved as part of White Stratus work with Bright Green Projects. However, what became clearly apparent during this engagement was that in some cases, the real opportunity lies not in cost reduction, but in revenue generation. For independent software vendors, tapping into the new and fast growing Apps Marketplaces - which represent access to millions of businesses can be a great way to rapidly ramp up subscriber numbers and deliver revenue growth effectively.

White Stratus • email: [email protected] • New York - London - Sydney

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