Like many start-ups, MyAlerts grew, morphed and found its niche in the market during its first few years. Today MyAlerts provides consumer individualized marketing solutions embedded into online retailer websites. Handling millions of user interactions per month, change events in the system (like inventory back in stock) are monitored, which then trigger alerts so that retailers can develop relevant marketing solutions like advertising, promotions, discounts and more. The service has attracted online giants and big box retailers, pushing MyAlerts into higher and higher levels of growth. In just twelve months the company increased its customer base by 150 percent.
As the pace of growth made it challenging for MyAlerts to keep up with the massive flow of data, Chief Operations Officer Paul Hanson focused his development team on application building and architecture. Development operations lagged as a priority.
“We were keeping our heads above water, making sure we were meeting client needs and staying on top of updates,” said Hanson. “AWS allowed us to meet the computing needs of our growing business. But we knew we could do more to manage it.”
Rather than bring on more in-house staff, Hanson turned to Coherent Solutions to handle DevOps. He was familiar with Coherent’s work and liked their global delivery model which offers staffing flexibility and cost efficiencies.
Partner model goes beyond expectations
As with any offshore relationship, Hanson’s team needed to see the quality of work from their new partner before they could trust them with greater responsibility. They gave pieces of DevOps work to the Coherent team, relying heavily on Coherent’s onshore delivery manager to smooth communication with the offshore team in Belarus.
“Early on, it was especially helpful to have someone here we could talk face-to-face with,” explained Hanson. “We felt more certain that our needs were understood.”
