How Cisco Meraki Reduces Salesforce Deployment Time by 75%

The Challenge

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Manual Processes Cloud Global Development

With Salesforce at the core of their customer relationship management, sales automation, and marketing operations, Cisco Meraki needed to ensure smooth and efficient deployments that were crucial to supporting their global business operations. However, Cisco Meraki's Salesforce team of 50+ developers and admins struggled with time-consuming, manual deployment processes that impacted both team productivity and stakeholder satisfaction. 

The team faced several critical challenges with their Salesforce deployments, which required 14-16 hours for validation before deploying, often spanning two full days. "We never had a UI on Salesforce that could give us a timeline on how things are proceeding in our deployment pipeline," recalls Abhinav Agwan, Technical Systems Architect at Cisco Meraki. 

The challenges were particularly acute for their globally distributed team across the UK, India, and US time zones. Without a centralized system for tracking changes, there were frequent conflicts when multiple team members worked on the same components developers from the lack of visibility and communication. This often resulted in changes being overwritten during deployment, wasting days of development effort.

The impact extended beyond the development team to their business stakeholders. "If we get just one issue, we have to rerun our whole validation, while people are still waiting for their work to go to production.” Abhinav emphasizes, “the domino effect impacts the stakeholder experience." With three-week sprint cycles and uncertain deployments, the marketing and sales teams - comprising over 500 users each - experienced significant delays in getting needed features and updates. The developers and admins were constantly uncertain whether their changes would make it to production, creating a stressful work environment and affecting team morale.

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Key Challenges

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The Solution

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Dreaming for a DevOps Transformation

The turning point came when the Cisco Meraki team discovered Copado at Dreamforce. "Before Copado, we never had DevOps practices or processes. DevOps was a new term for everyone in the org, including me," Agwan comments.

After conducting a proof of concept with Copado, the team saw immediate potential for transformation. "We did a dry run on the changes that we deploy once in three weeks, and we saw that we are saving a lot of time — it took only four hours. That's a huge jump from a 16 hour, two day process. Nobody imagined that. It was a game changer for our org," recalls Abhinav. 

Copado provided Cisco Meraki with a complete DevOps solution that addressed their core challenges through automated deployment pipelines, sophisticated conflict management, and robust quality assurance tools. Copado’s merge conflict detection and resolution capabilities ensure no changes are overwritten, while back promotion features maintain sandbox parity across their global development team. 

The solution also introduced quality gates throughout the pipeline, including automated code quality checks, pull request reviews, and PMD code scanning. This comprehensive approach to quality assurance helps identify issues before they reach production, significantly reducing post-deployment problems.

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The Outcome

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Accelerated Delivery, Enhanced Quality

Since implementing Copado, Cisco Meraki has achieved remarkable improvements in their development and release processes. Deployment time has been slashed from 16 hours to just 4 hours - a 75% reduction that has transformed how the team operates. Release cycles have shortened from three weeks to weekly releases, enabling faster delivery of value to stakeholders.

The quality of deliverables has also seen significant improvement, with code quality scores rising from 72% to 85%. The team now achieves an 85-90% success rate in their releases, due to improved quality gates and reduced deployment failures, which is a dramatic improvement from their previous state. 

"Just the sheer fact that we are able to deploy anything on request, every single time without any failure, without any hiccups, is amazing," Abhinav notes. The transformation extends beyond metrics to the fundamental way the team works. 

The DevOps team has grown from a single release engineer to a four-person team effectively supporting 50+ developers. More importantly, the implementation has revolutionized team morale and productivity. "The team is super happy, and stress-free," Agwan explains. “When we come to the office, we’re motivated. Before, we didn’t know if our work would make it to production. Now we can focus on our jobs while Copado takes care of our releases.”

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The Future

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Expanding DevOps Excellence

With their DevOps foundation firmly established, Cisco Meraki is now expanding their use of Copado across other platforms, particularly MuleSoft. "Our next goal is to incorporate more systems in Copado, make it a centralized DevOps solution for all the tools and integrations that we have in place today," says Abhinav.

The team is also excited about Copado's AI capabilities, particularly the Build Agent for improving deployment and code quality. "Having a support agent there, like Copado’s AI Build Agent, will help new team members get through that initial phase and help improve deployment and code quality," Agwan concludes.

Through their partnership with Copado, Cisco Meraki has not only transformed their release management process but created a foundation for continued innovation and growth in their DevOps practices.

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