Bullhorn, Inc. is a Boston-based provider of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for staffing and recruiting organizations. Bullhorn’s software was specifically designed as a SaaS offering and is the only truly on-demand, integrated front office and social recruiting solution available to the staffing and recruiting industry. Bullhorn serves over 25,000 users in 2,500 companies across more than 35 countries. The company serves a diverse range of customers from fast-growing start-ups to some of the world’s largest recruiting firms.

Bullhorn’s services organization relies on CloudBees’ RUN@cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering to accelerate custom application development. “CloudBees has helped Bullhorn’s services team focus on our strengths: building custom applications for Bullhorn customers,” says Matthew Fischer, Director of Engineering Services, Bullhorn. “The CloudBees’ platform has allowed us to streamline the develop-to-deploy process for Java web applications, almost completely erasing the time and resources that are ordinarily required when deploying applications to the cloud.”

Challenge

To integrate the Bullhorn application fully into their client’s workflow and tailor it to the client’s specific needs, Bullhorn’s professional services team can customize and extend functionality, when necessary, using the software’s extensive APIs. To efficiently manage ongoing growth, Bullhorn needed to find a reliable platform on which their development team could readily deploy these custom application extensions to the cloud. 

To maximize value for Bullhorn clients, it was imperative for Fischer’s team that the PaaS solution they chose would minimize time spent dealing with infrastructure issues, such as load balancing, system monitoring and other technical integration issues. In short, the services team wanted to focus on developing applications for customers and minimize the significant time and resources usually spent deploying applications to the cloud. 

After assessing several solutions, Bullhorn determined that CloudBees’ RUN@cloud best met their requirements.

Solution

Bullhorn implemented RUN@cloud and within 18 months delivered 60 customized, cloud-based application implementations. The services team credits the CloudBees RUN@cloud platform for streamlining the application deployment process. Utilizing RUN@cloud has allowed the team to focus on fulfilling the specific needs of their customers, rather than being bogged down by troubleshooting issues that can plague cloud deployments. 

Fischer credits CloudBees for significantly improving the scalability of the custom extensions and applications his team delivers, “CloudBees’ dedicated servers --and the ability to balance applications across them -- is one of the most useful features for my team, along with session clustering and seamless DNS records for all applications.” Fischer also cites the abstraction provided by CloudBees--and the lack of need for another dedicated operations team to monitor infrastructure--as a crucial factor for Bullhorn.

“CloudBees has enabled us to scale dramatically,” Fischer continues. “Now my team spends an extremely small percentage of their time on infrastructure issues. It has removed a lot of friction -- it’s nice to not have to get in deep with web services and instead focus more directly on customer needs.”

“We’re thrilled with our decision to utilize the CloudBees’ PaaS,” Fischer concludes. “The ROI we’ve experienced since we began working with RUN@cloud has been phenomenal.” 

Results

• 80% reduction in time spent resolving infrastructure issues. Since initially deploying CloudBees, Fischer has been pleased with the return on investment Bullhorn has realized in several areas. “My team and I spend roughly 5% of our time dealing with configuration of the run time environment on any given project,” says Fischer. “I estimate that to be a nearly 80% reduction in the amount of time and resources that would otherwise have to be dedicated to dealing with infrastructure issues.”

• Readily scalable infrastructure enables Bullhorn to meet demanding customer needs. “We required a highly scalable environment to meet the demanding needs of our largest customers,” explains Fischer. “Utilizing the CloudBees PaaS, we are successfully meeting or exceeding customer expectations on a consistent basis.”

• Focus on customer satisfaction – not development infrastructure. “The CloudBees PaaS frees our developers up to do what they do best -- develop applications to meet customer needs,” says Fischer. “We’re committed to providing a high level of service to Bullhorn customers and CloudBees helps us realize that goal. Our development team can focus on the applications and be confident that CloudBees is equipped to efficiently handle any technical integration issues that arise.”

Going Forward

To date, Bullhorn has focused their efforts on CloudBees’ RUN@cloud offering for deployment of applications to the cloud. However, Fischer is exploring the use of CloudBees’ DEV@cloud offering for moving the development process into the cloud. Bullhorn Professional Services currently uses an internal development platform, but Fischer’s team has begun to work with DEV@cloud for experimental prototyping. Fischer specifically notes DEV@cloud’s automation and continuous build functionality (via integration with Jenkins CI server) as being very useful for his team.

Read, "A World of PaaSabilities," a NetworkWorld article about Bullhorn