Savvy business folks are realizing that every business is now a software business. From publishing and insurance companies to banks and government agencies, if your business has a website or mobile app, then you’ve got to think like a lean and disruptive startup if you want to stay relevant.
This may come naturally to people working at digital native companies—ones that were built from the ground up as a software business. But for longstanding conventional businesses like Bauer Media Group, making the shift from its traditional way of doing business (print publishing) to its current model (digital content) isn’t always so easy. Jan Schumann, system architect at Bauer Media, recently talked about the company’s digital transformation in front of a packed house at New Relic’s very first Berlin workshop.
Attendees also had the chance to learn how a successful digital native company runs its mobile business, thanks to a presentation given by Jan Gorman, delivery lead for iOS and Android at fashion etailer Zalando. Together, Gorman and Schumann’s talks provided an insightful look at what it takes to get ahead in the digital age.
Zalando optimizes for the intricacies of mobile
As a data-driven company, all teams at Zalando rely on software analytics from New Relic to accurately monitor their business data. The main reason why Zalando started using New Relic Mobile, explained Gorman, is because “New Relic is more than just crash logs.” His team uses New Relic to monitor everything from crashes and interaction traces to carrier performance and network traffic.
“While we can’t influence network traffic, what we can do is understand how many people are on various networks and make strategic product decisions based on that data,” said Gorman. For example, if you notice that a lot of your users are accessing your app through a 2G network, he said, you should probably adjust your APIs to make fewer calls that can slow down performance.
Zalando also uses New Relic Mobile to monitor its third-party APIs, such as PayPal, Facebook, and WhatsApp. “Another important reason we chose New Relic was because of the integration it provided with a third-party image library we use,” said Gorman. “We set up alerts to let us know if this and any of our other APIs encounter a problem.”
Being able to see the various interactions and intricacies of its mobile app is critical, explained Gorman. “Because, in the end, it all comes down to the customer experience,” he said. “We want to make sure we only have positive user reviews, and using New Relic helps us do that.”
Bauer Media embraces DevOps to empower digital content team
When Schumann first joined Bauer Media in January 2014, the company’s technology environment was in a totally different state than the one it’s in now. “The dev team was deploying code via FTP; the infrastructure was monolithic; our frontend and dev teams, operations, and CMS team were all operating in silos,” he explained. “There was very little interaction between them.”
To support the company’s new digital content strategy, Bauer reorganized and re-architected its teams and processes to follow a DevOps approach. Not only did this mean aligning its previously siloed teams, but also bringing in new technology like Puppet and shifting to a service-oriented architecture. The only other component they needed at that point was application performance monitoring.
“We tried New Relic because we were looking for an APM solution that integrates with our DevOps environment and was easy to install,” said Schumann, adding that right after installing the software analytics solution, “we immediately had insight into our framework without any configuration.” Today, Bauer relies on New Relic daily to
- Analyze frontend performance and find slow page loads in New Relic Browser.
- Identify what’s causing the performance issues they’re seeing in Browser by easily switching over to New Relic APM.
- Understand how the various services they’re using are interacting with each other via New Relic’s Service Maps feature.
The other great thing about the New Relic Platform, said Schumann, is that “you can feed any type of data into New Relic, thanks to the Plugins feature.” To monitor its HTTP accelerator, for example, Schumann created this publicly available Varnish plugin.
If you’re interested in learning more about Bauer’s DevOps approach and evolution as a media company, stay tuned for a video we recently filmed with the Bauer team in Hamburg, Germany.
Berlin image courtesy of Shutterstock.com. Event photo courtesy of Jay Fry.