Australian News Organization Salesforce Development
- Custom Software Development
- Confidential
- Quality
- 5.0
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"They deliver real features in less time than it takes most organizations to hold a meeting or provide an estimate."
- Publishing
- Sydney, Australia
- 5,001-10,000 Employees
- Phone Interview
- Verified
3wks developed a complex Google PaaS classifieds booking system. The project had a high degree of unknown factors, required heavy-lifting technologies, and was on a short timeline.
Project and operational cost savings exceed previous levels. The system delivered 157 releases in the first 12 months, with the largest release 3 weeks from idea to users and the fastest turnaround in five hours. 3wks exceeds expectations in the speed and quality of delivery and project management.
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
BACKGROUND
Please provide a brief description of what your company does for some background information.
We are one of Australia’s largest media companies, spanning newspapers, magazines, online, and subscription TV. We publish over 140 online and printed newspapers in major Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as in suburban areas.
And what is your position within the company?
Head of commercial platforms and products.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
What were your company’s business goals or reasons for undertaking the project?
Like many publishing organizations, we rely on classified ads from consumers, local businesses, and large enterprises as a source of income. Traditionally, booking and billing classifieds was manual and time-consuming. It was a mix of either field sales teams call centre agents, or basic online tools. Ads that are not booked online involved manually intensive processes. The potential rose for inadvertent errors such as typos or omissions. Seeking to be as customer-focused and efficient as possible, we wanted customers to be able to serve themselves by placing ads online. For customers, the classifieds booking system needed to be easy to use. It needs to give our customers more control over their ad content and allow them to publish ads online immediately. Our goals included fast time to market, lower costs, and less overhead in the form of call centre time and manual data entry.
SOLUTION
What was your process for selecting 3wks to work with?
We were looking for a partner with a start-up mentality. Traditional technology houses couldn't cope with the degree of unknowns we started with. Agencies couldn't help us with the heavy-lifting technologies. Neither could move at the speed we required with all these unknowns. 3wks immediately stood out as specialists in a new field: the art of committing to delivering to real users at lightning speed before you know what it is!
Why did you decide to build your application on Google App Engine instead of similar platforms?
We chose Platform as a Service (PaaS) over the traditional Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) because we estimated a 40% lower project cost. This was based on previous experience with both platforms. With IaaS, we need system administrators, database administrators, network specialists, application server specialists, and network security people. With PaaS, we avoid these costs (and more importantly the time delay and dependencies) because world-class resources at companies like Google have already solved all of those problems. We effectively get them for free.
This also reduces our operating costs dramatically because PaaS is elastic, which means that we don't have to have 40 servers just because we need them on one day of the week. We pay for what we use, which has turned out to be a massive cost reduction for us. We chose Google Cloud Platform over Amazon's Web Services because Google's PaaS offering was more mature and pre-integrated for building web and mobile apps. They have a host of convenient, built-in services. For example, Geo search, big data services, and the Google Prediction API. We didn't waste time choosing and integrating these services from third parties. With the Google Cloud Platform, we started building real features for our customers on day one and had them in users' hands within three weeks of the project starting.
Can you tell me about the scope of the project?
We built five separate web applications in the classifieds genre. Each one had a different customer base, branding, and architecture. Some of these were deliberate throw-away market tests (micro-investments) in local geographies before we built for the national market, like Traderoo. Our project team was fully self-sufficient with a blend of marketing, technical, and business support skills.
What parts of the project was 3wks involved in?
3wks provided a fully managed service in the early stages of the project. From branding, design, and technical build through to technical support, quality management, and customer support in the early stages. We were able to focus on the business strategy and executing our marketing plan. This allowed us time to establish a team of world-class resources over a more controlled period. We now fully support and extend the platform with internal resources, with peak cover from 3wks.
What areas were you able to develop in-house?
Due to the time pressures on these projects, we held to a specific strategy of avoiding changes to internal systems wherever possible. The only changes we made internally were for system integration, which was surprisingly pain-free. We were able to leverage investment in internal technologies made in the previous year.
What technologies were used?
We choose to use Google App Engine (Java)
- Built-in task queues
- Built-in distributed cache
- Built-in page speed cache
- Built-in A/B testing facility
- Built-in "backends" and CRON jobs
- Built-in Geo IP headers
- Built-in distributed logging log query feature
- Built-in warm-up requests
- Data Store
- Geo Search on Data Store
- Search API for full text search
- Big Query
- Blob Store
- Cloud Storage
- Maps API
- Prediction API
- Google Apps
- Domain hosting
- Mail hosting
Can you give us a sense of the size of the initiative in dollar terms or person months?
Sorry can’t discuss that.
How recent was the project finished?
This is effectively a startup business within our existing enterprise. It continues to evolve at a rapid rate and we continue to make significant investments.
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
What are the results of the project, and if you have any stats or metrics I’d be happy to hear them.
We currently see project/operational cost savings above previous levels. Over the first 12 months, we made 157 releases into production. Our largest release was 3 weeks from idea to users. This was typically the first release of a new product. The fastest idea-to-user turnaround was five hours. Our big data platform (BigQuery) has a single data set of over 300 million rows, which took us less than ten minutes to load from around 200GB of data in the blob store.
Since building the application, how has the Google App Engine platform/service/platform performed and do you still feel you made the right decision?
We're very pleased with the Google Cloud Platform. We've been surprised by the degree of local Google support here in Sydney. It's fast becoming our de facto standard for a host of other solutions in the mobile/web application space.
How did 3wks perform overall?
3wks is exceptional. They work in a way that we will use as a new model moving forward. They deliver real features in less time than it takes most organizations to hold a meeting or provide an estimate. We've delivered a whole host of capabilities we didn't list at the outset, as well as the original scope. Their core ability is breaking large, risky problems into tiny chunks and learning through direct customer feedback instead of meeting-room theories.
When working with 3wks, was there anything unique or special about them compared to other companies that you may have worked with?
Again, they really do deliver real features in less time than it takes the average organization to hold a meeting or provide an estimate. They always succeed.
And looking back on the project is there any area that 3wks could improve or you would do differently?
No, they were just great overall.
RATINGS
-
Quality
5.0Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
"Very exceptional. Their entire business model is arranged around speed and quality."
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
"We delivered five products this year with half the budget from the previous year because of the 3wks team."
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS
"Yes, without hesitation.