Clarus Financial Technology accelerates time to market with CloudBees

CloudBees, Inc.’s platform has played a fundamental part in the growth and performance of financial services software company Clarus Financial Technology. Streamlining development processes and reducing infrastructure costs, Clarus is reaping the rewards of increased efficiency and developer productivity due to its cloud-based approach to continuous integration and continuous delivery.

Gary Kennedy, COO at Clarus Financial Technology, explains that developing on the CloudBees PaaS has enabled his team to focus and concentrate efforts where they are needed-- developing the Clarus software offerings. As a result, Clarus has grown significantly over the last two years. “It was a no brainer for us,” Kennedy said. “At the outset we knew that taking a cloud-based approach to our application development was going to be critical to our success, and enable us to handle fast growth. The CloudBees Platform offers us the ability to respond quickly to market needs and a level of agility that our competitors struggle to match. In addition, I’d estimate it’s given us around a 10-15 percent saving in overall costs vs. an on-premise solution that we would have to build out and maintain.”

Kennedy was keen to work with a PaaS company that offered Clarus consistent 24x7 up-time, a secure infrastructure and the ability to be flexible in his team’s development approach. Kennedy continued, “Our business within the financial services sector means security is a critical part of our offering. We felt CloudBees offered a very secure environment and its customers attested to that. The reliability of the service is second to none, which is critical for us when trusting a service provider with our application development infrastructure.”

Clarus has used the CloudBees Platform since inception to provide source control management, continuous integration via Jenkins, hosted databases and web application deployment. The Clarus development team follows agile continuous delivery processes and with the CloudBees Platform the team can receive a bug report in the morning, create a fix for the bug, run test suites and deploy the fix that same evening. Kennedy comments, “Such agility is tremendously valuable to us and of course our customers, as is our ability to have anywhere, anytime access wherever we are in the world.”

Kennedy foresees a long partnership with CloudBees. “The support we receive from CloudBees has been second to none within the build environment,” he said. “The overall company growth we have achieved is absolutely related to the cloud-based approach we have taken for software development. The CloudBees PaaS has supported our ability to be agile and react quickly to customer demand. We just wouldn’t have enjoyed the competitive edge we have today had we used a traditional, on-premise IT infrastructure solution that we would have had to build out and maintain ourselves.”