The Story at a Glance
CleanSlate Technology Group partnered with Herff Jones on a two-year initiative to modernize aging legacy technologies and applications. The goal: to transform operations and revenue through scalable, cloud-based solutions that improved the company’s reliability and agility.
This modernization effort led to increased system uptime, faster and more efficient yearbook production, and a cloud-enabled architecture that allowed Herff Jones to scale effortlessly during seasonal demand spikes.
The result? A future-ready, resilient digital platform that enhances operational efficiency and supports continued business growth—without production outages.
What Had to Change
Substandard DevOps and Automation Practices
Client was continuously missing product delivery deadlines and declining code quality and deployment success causing delays and poor customer experiences.
Questionable Legacy Systems
Capacity constraints were limiting much-needed non-production environments, which reduced work that could be completed in parallel. And with multiple projects being launched, Herff Jones needed to discover what they had and what they needed.
Imminent Failure of Application Generating a Large Percentage of Revenue
Herff Jones flagship application – a web-based digital designer – responsible for the lion’s share of revenue was at the end of life. Twenty years old and relying on Flash, the app lacked scalability, the ability to support new features, and a modern UI/UX. It was just a matter of time before it imploded.
Aging, Failure-Prone Data Center Scheduled for Decommission
The on-premise and aging Oracle database contained over 20TB of data. The database was beginning to fail because the web-based designer application created a high load of uploaded images and multiple inputs from different users. The slow process times and poor reliability impacted customer satisfaction.
How CleanSlate Responded
Migrated Legacy Systems to AWS
CleanSlate containerized the application so it could be deployed on-premise and within AWS. To mitigate stress on the aging infrastructure, we migrated the application to AWS and then modernized it.
Introduced Modern Cloud DevOps and CI/CD Processes
CleanSlate implemented a new DevOps process focused on automation. In addition, we also:
- Enabled the ability to have an unlimited number of scrum teams deploying and building code daily.
- Built and deployed processes and integrated with appropriate tools.
- Implemented automated deployment processes for each application suite.
- Created automated build processes for each application type.
- Provided a self-services website so development teams could launch code builds and deployments on-demand and troubleshoot build issues.
Application Modernization
CleanSlate built a cutting edge SaaS application to enable a community driven application approach to enable Herff Jones to continually compete in the competitive market.
What Changed
CleanSlate successfully implemented the new cloud architecture and
cloud migration
, minimizing impact to business operations with no production outages. And by introducing automation, Herff Jones can create new non-production environments in as little as 1 hour, enabling multiple teams to work in parallel for significantly increased productivity. Previously this process would have taken 4-6 weeks.
CleanSlate successfully implemented an AWS DevOps pipeline which enabled developers to run applications locally and in the cloud without concern of installing all necessary dependencies. The standardized and automated CI/CD processes made build and deployment status transparent.
The 20TB database migration was completed within the expected schedule without unplanned customer downtime or outages. There were zero data loss or data integrity issues. The cloud migration happened “behind the scenes,” reducing the involvement of key client resources from other projects.
And perhaps, most important, the kids. The new state-of-the-art and user-friendly web-based design application ensured that future generations of students could memorialize, celebrate, and share some of the most important years of their lives. While most of the technology and inventive problem-solving may be hidden, it’s what you can see – the smiles – that make us most proud.
Ready to Move Forward?
Start with a structured assessment of your environment, priorities, and constraints. CleanSlate can help turn that into a practical path forward.