How Cision implemented DevOps best practices for Salesforce
Since 2006, Cision has been using Salesforce to empower their sales team, streamline customer interactions, and manage customer support. Two Salesforce development teams focus on different areas of the business, supporting a total of 1,500 end users on both sides of the Atlantic.
We spoke with four members of the Salesforce development team at Cision about their use of Salesforce and their journey to adopting Gearset for release management.
Salesforce deployment processes that couldn’t scale
Like most teams, Cision started out running deployments with Salesforce’s native change sets tooling. But with a growing team, and Salesforce providing ever more functionality, deployments were becoming increasingly complex. Just selecting the right metadata to build a successful deployment package was difficult.
The team at Cision ultimately concluded that release management with change sets couldn’t scale. Srikar Beemagouni, Salesforce Technical Lead, explained:
“Change sets can’t work. Pushing code risks overwriting someone else’s work, so you have to manually check that none of the team is stepping on each other’s toes — especially around profiles. It was very tedious!”
Adding to the challenge, Cision saw several mergers and acquisitions that required lots of configuration changes in Salesforce. It was obvious that a better process and toolset was needed.
Finding the right DevOps solution for Salesforce
The developers at Cision introduced BitBucket for version control. But they decided against using an open source tool like Jenkins for automated deployments, because it would require a team dedicated to maintaining the toolchain.
A consulting firm recommended Gearset to Cision, and this prompted them to explore DevOps products built specifically for Salesforce. The Cision team had demos with all the products in the Salesforce DevOps market and decided Gearset was the right solution.
The visibility and control over deployments that Gearset provides has transformed release management for Cision’s Salesforce environments. “Gearset makes life easier,” continued Srikar. “Its metadata comparisons show you what has changed, so you understand what you’re deploying.”
Lauren Krcatovich, Development Manager, CRM Applications, set out the business case for choosing Gearset. With Cision wanting to move fast as a business, requirements are constantly building up for the Salesforce team to tackle. Being able to deliver those Salesforce requirements quickly with Gearset has made the team a trusted partner internally.
“The value of Gearset is that we’re delivering quality code. We rarely have to do rollbacks — the goal is accuracy and Gearset has really helped with that. It keeps us organized, which is vital for a global organization working across different time zones and continents. We have a single place we trust to track all changes and minimize risk. That’s allowed us to implement standard DevOps best practices and become a really trusted partner within Cision.”
Deploying Salesforce CPQ configuration just like metadata
The development teams at Cision work with Salesforce CPQ configuration as well as standard Salesforce metadata. Deploying CPQ configuration is notoriously difficult, since it’s not represented with metadata but an intricate and interrelated data model. Many DevOps tools don’t support CPQ deployments, but Gearset’s add-on for CPQ enables developers to compare and deploy CPQ configuration just like Salesforce metadata.
Derek Dere and Cosme Ramirez, two of Cision’s Salesforce developers, saw the impact of Gearset on their CPQ implementation just a few months ago. Derek told us that “before Gearset, we used to handle CPQ manually and it was such a headache.” Cosme added, “deployment times and implementation times were increasing exponentially — it could take somewhere between 2–8 hours to deploy CPQ. Now with Gearset for CPQ it’s easy to deploy within 15 minutes.”
Those significant time-savings mean that the team spends less time deploying and more time developing — building and delivering the solutions that accelerate Cision’s sales cycle.
Partnering with Gearset for success
Cision has found in Gearset a platform for a reliable release process. And as Lauren points out, “the product continues to evolve and they’re continuously coming out with new features and opportunities for us to improve.”
The team at Cision has also found working with Gearset helpful. Lauren added:
“The team are super helpful and super responsive — always willing to get on a call and meet with us. Derek and Cosme have spent a lot of time with Gearset’s product team as we’ve been implementing the CPQ feature. They literally never had any issues getting a hold of somebody. And our CSM at Gearset reaches out with product updates too, so we know what features we can adopt to keep growing.”
Cision recommend Gearset for Salesforce DevOps
Srikar tells us he has recommended Gearset to many people, and Cosme summed up:
“Whether I need to jump on a deployment or roll back something — it’s always just a couple of clicks. Gearset is really easy and I feel confident using it. I can’t imagine an alternative.”
