Infobip – a billion dollar company: Scale like a startup, standardize like an enterprise with Atlassian Data Center

Growing pains spark the need for a more integrated solution

When Infobip started in a small Croatian town in 2006, their focus was on helping local businesses authenticate customer identities using SMS. Keeping track of tasks, projects, and issues was fairly easy at the time, but as they expanded to the rest of Europe, then to Asia and Africa, then to Latin America and the U.S., they began to suffer the distinct sting of growing pains. To continue their impressive growth more efficiently, and maintain compliance in so many industries and locales, Infobip needed to centralize their systems and workflows.

The team chose to standardize onto Atlassian Server in 2012 because of its reputation as the go-to, 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, plus Confluence as a knowledge hub for both technical and non-technical teams. Departments across the organization started using it to track objectives and key results, team activities, documentation, best practices, questions for executive leaders, and more. 

Since its initial rollout, engineers have expanded their use of Jira Software to portfolio management in addition to product development. “We are not just thinking about a feature, epic, and user stories, but also about the portfolio so we can prioritize what’s important,” says Damir Prusac, VP of Engineering. Today, Product Development relies on Jira Software to shape the product strategy and translate it into requirements. Engineering then uses the same solution to develop, test, and support the products built from those requirements, deploying from Bitbucket each time. 

Bitbucket also comes in handy for compliance. “The first question auditors ask is how you track changes,” says Renato Klarić, Site Reliability Manager. “Jira and Bitbucket are linked to show details and where the change is in production. It’s traceable, so they know what we’re doing and when we’re deploying.”

With billions of people using their product every day, there is no room for risk. The team relies on SonarQube testing to proactively spot bugs and vulnerabilities, plus canary testing to validate new releases before rollout. With in-depth testing at several stages of the product life cycle, Infobip can feel confident about product quality and compliance.

Scaling DevOps with new practices and partnerships

In recent years, Engineering has been focused on increasing knowledge sharing and reducing administrative burden. “Before, we were one team, but there was a separation between hardware and software, and frontend and backend,” says Renato. “We had to do a lot of back and forth between those teams, which was a blocker for the speed and agile development we needed.”

To overcome these challenges, Infobip separated the large Engineering department into multiple teams by their function – monitoring, infrastructure, automation, continuous improvement and development, etc. – so they could work faster and focus more. They also collaborated with Solution Partner venITure to introduce LeSS, a framework specifically created for multiple teams who work together on a single product, to scale Infobip’s Scrum practice and provide more transparency to leadership. With this framework, each team now has the freedom to choose their own processes and set up their own workflows in Jira Software and Bitbucket. Leaders then standardize these workflows at a higher level so engineers can collaborate across teams and work more efficiently at scale. 

Streamlining their workflows and adopting modern DevOps practices is already paying off, while laying the groundwork to continue their pace of progress in the future. Damir says, “The number of deployments constantly increases as the organization grows. And keeping deployments per developer high helps us stay agile.”

Fewer incidents and faster resolution with Jira Service Management

As Engineering has revamped their processes to scale product development, Support has been doing the same for ITSM. Years ago, Infobip had a network operations center (NOC) monitoring their infrastructure for peace of mind, but all the alerts were overwhelming and frustrating. Renato recalls, “We could have 25,000 alerts, and you would have to go through each one to see what’s happening. Only one tells you what’s really wrong, and the rest were consequences.” 

To reduce alert fatigue and response time while boosting team morale, Infobip integrated Jira Service Management into their Atlassian solution. Incident management through Opsgenie proved to be a sanity-saver for monitoring and on-call alerts. “Before, it was complex to figure out who to call when we or a client detected an issue, and it took time to manually call the right person. Jira Service Management helps us get the right people online at the right time,” Renato says.

Whenever Support or the NOC reports an incident, an alert is triggered in Jira Service Management, and the on-call engineer is notified. Team members then start a new thread in a special incident management Slack channel to troubleshoot the issue together and coordinate client communication with Support. 

Once the incident is resolved, the team conducts a post-incident review, documents their findings and any changes in Confluence, and links the incident to Jira Software tickets for subsequent tasks if needed. Tasks related to changes are labeled and tracked in Jira Software, and pull requests in Bitbucket are linked to Jira Software for more context about the change. Engineers can deploy basic configuration changes without approval, while more significant changes require additional levels of review by architects. 

With more structured incident and change management processes, along with better systems to support them, Infobip has seen the time to detect, engage, and fix issues all decrease. “In the beginning, it could take three days to close an alert. Now, the average is three minutes before they see the alert, close it, and start working on the issue,” Renato says. “We’re also seeing fewer incidents and improved fix times with older products.” 

Upgrading and integrating in the name of stability and efficiency

As Infobip expanded from one small office in Croatia to 65+ offices globally and 39 data centers around the world, they were confronted with another common challenge among growing, global companies: minimizing administration while maximizing stability and efficiency. Upgrading to Atlassian Data Center with venITure’s support helped boost uptime and performance, while offloading maintenance so they could focus on scaling and innovation. 

“We moved to Data Center because we wanted to ensure more stability and continuous uptime, as well as long-term sustainability with our Atlassian solution,” Damir says. Developer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive since the upgrade, with high availability standing out as one of the biggest improvements. 

Infobip has also integrated several Marketplace apps for further time and cost savings. “Insight is very important to keep predictability and planning of software licenses and costs,” Damir notes. “We also integrated a solution that makes it convenient to track OKR progress, and our Salesforce integration is becoming important to track part of the sales process.”

“We don’t do it if it doesn’t help our customers”

Now that Infobip is being used by two-thirds of the world’s population in almost 200 countries, leveraging Atlassian Data Center to standardize and scale has proven to be a necessity, not just a luxury.

“Each landscape is very dynamic. We need to accommodate a lot of different setups so our customers have the freedom to choose how they want to deliver messages. It’s very tricky if you don’t do it in an automated way,” Damir says. “There are also lots of privacy and security requirements in each country and region, like GDPR. It takes a lot of infrastructure and engagement with our customers to accommodate all these different needs.”

venITure has played a key role in helping Infobip adapt, and they continue to collaborate on ways to take Infobip’s processes and platform to the next level. “venITure has been the perfect partner for us. It’s not just about the licenses, it’s about consulting and building new channels to the marketplace,” says Damir. 

venITure Partner Kristijan Luburic adds that the two companies are currently working together to launch an Atlassian Marketplace app that integrates Jira Service Management Cloud with the Infobip API, so customers can use any channel Infobip serves (WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, etc.) to communicate with their users in more ways. 

And for Infobip, that’s what it’s all about: building meaningful customer relationships by making it easy to engage with people in the channels of their choice. “Everything we do is about serving our customers. We don’t do it if it doesn’t help our customers,” Damir says. “It’s about improving processes across the organization...We try to integrate all of our teams and services while still being compliant. Atlassian helps us in this process of bringing everything and everyone together.”