Project snapshot
PandaDoc is a digital document collaboration and workflow automation platform that helps businesses streamline their document creation process. It enables 50,000 customers to create, track, approve, and e-sign all kinds of documents quickly and securely. With powerful document management and workflow capabilities, PandaDoc provides customers with a professional, timely, and engaging experience.
The San Francisco–based PandaDoc has grown from a startup to one of the market leaders by democratizing the world of commerce for B2B companies and extending CRM tools to help smooth out interactions with customers.
In 2017, PandaDoc raised $15 million in a Series B funding round that counted HubSpot and Microsoft Ventures as participants. This was the first investment HubSpot ever made.
Business Challenge
A technology trailblazer offering an innovative suite of document automation tools for businesses, PandaDoc had a critical need for scaling their business by moving from a sales-oriented to a product-led organization. In this context, they sought a reliable partner to help them gain flexibility, scale, and enable interoperability of their key digital marketing engineering assets: namely, their website as well as related blogs and distributed country-specific sales and branding instances.
As part of their digital transformation strategy, PandaDoc recognized the need to upgrade their online presence and IT infrastructure to better support their growing business operations. The first critical step was to migrate their corporate website, built on WordPress, to the highly scalable and reliable AWS Cloud platform. This migration aligned with the company’s newly adopted DevOps practices, enabling more efficient website management and deployment processes.
The move to AWS Cloud was driven by several key business objectives. First, it would significantly improve website performance, ensuring faster page load times and a smoother user experience for PandaDoc’s customers and prospects. Second, the inherent scalability of AWS would allow the website to handle traffic spikes seamlessly, supporting business growth without compromising availability. Furthermore, leveraging AWS’s robust security features would enhance the protection of sensitive data and Intellectual Property hosted on the website.
Additionally, migrating to the cloud would result in substantial cost savings compared to maintaining an on-premises data center, freeing up resources that could be reinvested into PandaDoc’s core product development and market expansion efforts. Overall, this strategic infrastructure overhaul positioned PandaDoc for long-term success in the digital landscape, enabling them to deliver a superior online experience and optimize operational efficiency.
Solution delivered
Working in sync with the client’s core team, the Intellias experts carried out a meticulous technology assessment, comprising an audit of the existing software, hardware, and network architecture, as well as an analysis of integration flows and a review of non-functional requirements fulfillment. They also provided recommendations to improve the software development life cycle (SDLC), infrastructure, and code.
The team of software engineers, AWS DevOps engineers, and quality assurance specialists provided AWS cloud migration and documentation. This included infrastructure as code (IaC) using Terraform and Terragrunt, containerized application deployment using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), and secure secrets management using HashiCorp Vault.
The use of Amazon EKS enabled more granular scalability and advanced deployment strategies, like blue/green and canary deployments. The team implemented a CI/CD pipeline using GitLab for version control, automated builds, and deployments onto the EKS cluster.
Intellias maintained end-to-end DevOps consulting services and helped the client build the right software development and operations (SDO) process. This was in order to implement changes by multiple stakeholders according to various business priorities.
Next, the team extended the existing environment with third-party software applications and tools used to support the solution. This includes Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for database hosting, Application Load Balancer (ALB) for traffic distribution, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for static content storage, Amazon CloudFront for content delivery network (CDN), and the WordPress plugin WP Offload Media for offloading media files to S3
Applying AWS DevOps practices enabled smooth and speedy implementation within strict timelines as well as better agile collaboration between development and operations teams.
Business impact
By assisting PandaDoc in migrating their infrastructure to the AWS cloud, Intellias empowered them to obtain operational excellence with higher scalability, availability, and improved website security.
The combination of AWS’s cloud services and DevOps practices has empowered PandaDoc to deliver superior customer experiences, drive innovation, and achieve operational excellence, positioning the company for continued growth and success in the document automation market.
As a result of integrating cross-technology expertise and AWS DevOps practices, the client experienced increased user engagement and conversion rates as well as three times faster time to market for new functionality through the introduction of weekly releases.
Increased website speed and performance: Leveraging AWS CloudFront (Content Delivery Network), Auto Scaling, load balancing, and high availability features has improved the reliability and fault tolerance of the client’s websites and applications, minimizing downtime and ensuring consistent and uninterrupted access for users. This has resulted in enhanced customer experience and better conversions for their online presence.
Scalability and agility: With AWS’s infrastructure as code (IaC) approach and auto-scaling capabilities, PandaDoc can rapidly scale resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency. This agility enables the company to respond quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs.
Faster time-to-market: By adopting DevOps practices and leveraging AWS’s continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, the client has accelerated its software delivery cycles. New features, updates, and country-specific instances can be released faster, giving the company a competitive edge in the market.
Operational efficiency: By automating infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and monitoring with AWS and DevOps tools, PandaDoc has streamlined its operations, reducing manual effort and minimizing the risk of human errors. This has allowed the company to focus more resources on innovation and strategic initiatives.
Improved security and compliance: AWS’s robust security services and compliance certifications have enabled PandaDoc to strengthen its security posture and meet regulatory requirements more effectively. This has increased customer trust and confidence in the company’s document automation solutions.
Refined collaboration and productivity: The DevOps culture fostered by AWS has facilitated better collaboration between development and operations teams both within the company and with Intellias experts. This synergy has broken down silos, enhancing productivity and streamlining problem-solving processes. Consequently, the quality of PandaDoc’s products and services has seen a notable improvement.
By streamlining the development lifecycle and ensuring a timely migration to AWS cloud services, the Intellias team contributed to advancing the quality of the client’s offering, helping to establish PandaDoc as a leader in the digital technology industry. The migration to AWS cloud services became a milestone in PandaDoc’s partnership with Intellias, leading to further successful cooperation with a focus on product-led business growth.