Driving 2-Hour Sprint Deployments for BlueWave Solar
by the Numbers
2003
Founded Year
162
Employees
135MW+
of solar Projects To Date
$80.3 M
In Revenue (2018 Data)
About the company
As a pioneering developer of Community Solar projects and leading Community Solar service provider, BlueWave has built more than 135 MW of solar projects to date and provides community solar power access to thousands of customers throughout the country.
BlueWave’s groundbreaking Solar Management Platform enables solar asset owners and installers to conveniently manage their customers while giving those same customers an easily accessible online dashboard to sign up for solar solutions, manage their subscriptions, and review their account activity.
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BlueWave Solar has been on the Salesforce platform since 2015 and has seen vast improvements in their business processes, yet there was one area that they continued to struggle with - the area of DevOps.
As the release team at BlueWave continued to grow and scale, their release process became increasingly frustrating. Enter Copado.
Senior Director of Product Management, BlueWave Solar
Results with Copado
50%
10X Faster
More Components Per Deployment
80%
9X Faster
Reduction In Manual Deployment Tasks
~6 Hours
Of Sprint Deployments vs. 6 Days
360
Version Control And Quality Control
The Challenge
To manage their release process, BlueWave employed the use of changesets and ANT scripts. Changesets needed to be manually built and managed, as every time there was a change made, it needed to be manually tracked, and sometimes entirely rebuilt.
This was further amplified by the lack of version control and a single source of truth for configuration changes, which resulted in countless overwrites. The culmination of this was countless precious hours lost to double-checking and rebuilding rather than time spent on net new creation.
Achieving Continuous Innovation With Copado DevOps
Due to the lack of transparency into what was changing in a release, it was often hard for the team to realize until it was too late. This led to sandboxes having to be refreshed more frequently, which was risky as each refresh could also mean a loss of data and an additional round of testing.
As the team continued to grow, their difficulties started to become too much to bear. To maintain their level of efficiency and turn their release process up a notch, the team knew they needed to do something. The team decided to start searching for a DevOps solution.
KeyChallenges
The Solution
BlueWave chose Copado as it was the only Salesforce-native platform that leveraged a GIT repository and had the full suite of automation features and DevOps processes that they were looking for.
Copado provided BlueWave with a single source of truth through their GIT repository, allowing them to collaborate effectively and reduce the likelihood of overwrites. With Copado, the users could now review configuration changes in GIT and ensure that each one met their stringent quality and compliance standards. They didn’t have to refresh sandboxes as often, which reduced the chances of data loss.
The Future
BlueWave is now able to deploy more continuously and more frequently in an efficient manner. Earlier, smaller changes were able to be executed about once a month, and now, through Copado, BlueWave is able to release several times a day straight to production.
BlueWave has been able to achieve its goal of releasing sophistication by automating its process to operate at a new scale: continuous innovation. Therefore, the team is able to focus on new innovation, instead of on their frustrations, which ultimately means getting innovation into the hands of the end-user faster.
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