How Ciplex works 20% faster with LEAN Methodology & Pantheon

Zach Ferres is the CEO of Ciplex, a full-service interactive agency that helps clients succeed online by creating award-winning digital solutions for design, online marketing, e-commerce and content management systems, and social network platforms. 

A Dream Team For Lean Startups 

Ciplex specializes in building web applications in Drupal. Recent projects include a large social network, a social greeting card platform, an online acne management program, and a social video platform. We don’t believe in lengthy contracts and drawn-out development cycles. Instead, we apply LEAN and Agile methodologies so clients can get to market quickly, test assumptions, and iterate based on feedback.

Once a client is ready, we put a fully-dedicated SCRUM Agile team on the project. This methodology is our differentiator as an agency. And it happens to save our clients a lot of money and time. Pantheon is a big part of that.

Our agency has launched more than 2,000 websites. Since narrowing our focus to web applications, we’ve built about 50 Drupal sites on Pantheon, and have standardized on Pantheon for all our Drupal and WordPress sites.

How Our Agency Has Evolved

(And Why We'll Never Manage Another Server.) 

The push to move all our sites to Pantheon actually happened from the bottom up. Once developers tried it, they fell in love. Now our Drupal and WordPress teams use Pantheon exclusively as their development environment, and our agency uses Pantheon One for Agencies to manage all our WordPress and Drupal sites through one dashboard. It’s been a godsend.

To illustrate how much better our workflow is now, here’s a list of things we don’t do anymore:

1. WE DON’T MANAGE SERVERS ANYMORE 
When I joined Ciplex 3 years ago, we did all our hosting in-house, and offered it to clients as a service. We needed an in-house IT guy to handle all the stuff related to our Rackspace servers. Even after we started working with a partner company to do the hosting, websites still needed additional support. For example, our in-house IT guy did a lot of the caching stuff. I did a lot of server optimization. Now, we don’t worry about hosting at all anymore. We no longer have an in-house IT guy. And I can’t remember the last time I optimized a server.

2. WE DON’T NEED COMPLEX FLOWCHARTS TO LAUNCH PERFECTLY. 
I used to run a hosting company, so I’m familiar with all the steps it takes to get a site launch right. It’s a cumbersome process. Before Pantheon, I was constantly getting involved in complex launch situations. I had it down to a solid process for how to use cPanels for Drupal, WordPress, and Magento. But it was so time-consuming. You never know what’s going to happen with millions of permutations of [Apache, Cento, x Linux distributions]. Little issues were always popping up. Now, Pantheon’s Launch Team and the Launch Check dashboard keep every website on target for a smooth launch, every time. We don’t have to deal with the hassles of launch migration, since Pantheon can do it with the flip of a switch.

3. WE DON’T MESS AROUND WITH VERSION CONTROL, SO WE’RE 15-20% FASTER. 
Before Pantheon, we set up our own version control systems. We built one of our first sites with a Jenkins and Capistrano framework. We tried all sorts of things. It got messy. When we started moving away from smaller informational websites to eCommerce and web apps, we had to take version control and site backups seriously. Performance, scalability, and cloud file storage became extremely important. We started to develop Drupal workflows to get version control in place. We were playing around with github to figure out what we would do in terms of internal processes.

Now, Pantheon’s version control tools, seamless environment switching, and Multidev free up quite a bit of time during development and post-development. I’d estimate we’re 15 to 20 percent faster. Plus, we don’t have to manage servers. Since we sell weeks of time, more efficiency means lower costs and faster progress for our customers. With Pantheon, we’re able to get a 100k project migrated and live in 5 or 6 weeks. We can easily manage multiple environments for easy updates and new feature pushes. If we didn’t have forced version control, there’s no way we’d be able to build complex web applications with any sort of efficiency.

4. OUR TEAM DOESN’T STEP ON EACH OTHER’S TOES.
Multidev lets us develop in parallel, working on the same code base at the same time. It also gives us a commit log. We can go back and see who did what, when, and why. This makes it easy to revert back and undo any changes to code that caused bugs or other problems. If you get good with version control, you can make changes faster than what you could do with FTP.

5. OUR WORDPRESS DEVELOPERS DON’T MESS WITH SERVERS, EITHER. 
When Pantheon for WordPress launched, we told our WordPress guys to give it a shot on a project. “We think you’ll like it.” They did the first site and launched it, and came back raving about it. “Guys, this is amazing, let’s just use this from now on.” So we switched all our WordPress sites over to Pantheon for WordPress.

How (& Why) We Recommend Pantheon to All Our Clients 

In addition to developing on Pantheon, we also recommend it to our clients. Our recommendation is pretty much all it takes to persuade them. It’s such a cohesive fit with what we’re already doing. Here’s the pitch that convinces our clients to launch and run their sites on Pantheon:

1. Launch faster. You don’t waste time preparing environments. If you’re going to plan a major, one-year initiative to launch a site, perhaps you could dedicate resources to create an Amazon environment. But if you just want to launch quickly, hit the ground running, and adjust—Pantheon is the one. It’s essentially created around the same methodologies our agency uses. Plus, your site will always have snappy performance, thanks to Pantheon’s Drupal cache optimization and cloud delivery.

2. Launch a better product. When it comes to complex web apps, time is even more important than money. Our clients are often working against an aggressive launch schedule. If we can get three more days to do development and push more features, our clients launch a better product. With Pantheon, when we finish building a site, we can get an SSL certificate and enable a domain, and recommend our clients use the package through the Pantheon Platform. They click a link, put in their credit card number, and the site goes live. That’s powerful. It saves us time, and it saves customers both time and money. Launching means flipping a switch, rather than a three-day server configuration process.

3. Save thousands on hosting. Even though Pantheon’s hosting solution might cost a bit more than something like GoDaddy or Amazon, you’re going to make that back and then some, thanks to increased efficiency in the development process. Also, Pantheon’s variable cost model plays nicely with our LEAN and Agile philosophy of building web applications. As you scale, you can throttle up.

4. Managed support. Whenever you launch a site, there’s always stuff around hosting. If you’re launching a marketing campaign, there’s always stuff around scaling. As an agency, we only focus on one project at a time. So, having a managed support solution for our clients buys us peace of mind. Amazon doesn’t even have a phone number to call.

Any Complaints?

While Drupal and WordPress comprise the majority of our sites, we still do a few enterprise Magento sites as well. We wish Pantheon supported Magento. Then we could use Pantheon exclusively, companywide.