How Customers Save Time and Money with Mattermost
First, an introduction.
My name is Matt Yonkovit. In September, I joined Mattermost as the head of Customer Success.
For the last 13 years, I’ve helped customers succeed using open source software. My goal at Mattermost is to build out a world-class support and success program that enables our customers and community to use Mattermost to revolutionize their business processes and workflow.
I get excited when customers tell me all the ways they’ve deployed and used our software to make their businesses thrive. I want to take this opportunity to share some of those stories.
It is truly amazing to see how the community has embraced and used Mattermost. While known as a messaging platform, it has given users so much more. In fact, for many companies, Mattermost has become the platform that integrates all of their disparate systems and processes into a cohesive, streamlined and real-time workflow.
So, in my short time here, how exactly are our customers succeeding?
Most importantly, they are saving tons of time and money while being able to focus their resources on the things that matter most (no pun intended!)—like moving their businesses forward and generating new and exciting projects and development efforts.
As the old adage tells us, time is money. This is particularly true when it comes to modern enterprises. Delays of a few minutes can cause millions of dollars in lost revenue—or even fines.
The speed with which companies can respond to issues, access data, solve downtime and execute commands can make or break them. If you don’t want to throw away money, you shouldn’t want to waste time, either.
1. First-generation integrations
The most common use case I have encountered during my short time here is using Mattermost to accelerate and manage the development lifecycle and release cycle. This means integrating a wide variety of tools into Mattermost— like Jira, GitLab, Bitbucket, Pivotal Tracker, Jenkins and others—which represents a classic first-generation automation setup.
Here, developers are making their day-to-day tasks more accessible and more efficient. This enables them to spend more time building code and generating revenue and less time on the overhead.
It’s easy to gain back 10%–15% of developers’ time by automating and streamlining these processes. When you have a lot of developers, that adds up!
Imagine a large enterprise with 5,000 developers. You could free up hundreds of developers’ time simply by optimizing your workflow.
What projects could you tackle to help move the business forward with the equivalent of hundreds of extra developers? That’s an excellent question to have to answer.
2. Speeding resolution of business-critical issues
The fastest growing trend I see is using Mattermost to speed resolution time and prevent outages and general issues.
Stop me if you heard this before: You are out at dinner and your phone dings. Your monitoring tool just alerted you to an application issue. You grab your laptop, log in, check the alerts, review the system, maybe get a couple of people involved from other departments, fix the problem, document what you did and go back to eat your now-cold dinner.
We have all tried to automate these problems away by building more robust and durable systems. But these things still happen.
Let me ask you this: How long can your main application be down or operating at fractional speeds before you start losing money?
In such scenarios, speed is of the utmost importance.
One of the cool ways we have seen Mattermost used is automating and consolidating all the relevant information and people involved in fixing the issue into a single channel.
Imagine this:
- An alert triggers, opening up a new channel
- Everyone on call is invited
- The alert writes the relevant logs, system information and statistics into the channel
- It sets up a new Zoom link for the team to dial into and talk about the issue
- It gives you access to additional commands to get more information or even restart specific services (while documenting the output)
In less than a minute, you have consolidated everything into a single secure location capable of diagnosing and fixing the issue. You have also gotten everyone involved into a single “War Room” to help you fix the issue. Finally, you have documented the issue and logged what you did to fix it.
3. Security response
This process can be used for more than remedying application issues. It’s also an invaluable tool for handling security-related incidents.
Recently, I heard from a large financial institution that follows this process when a new vulnerability or security issue is reported.
Imagine how important speed is in these situations. If a hacker gets into your infrastructure, how much time are you willing to let that individual run around before stopping them?
Scary right?
This company was able to drop their response time from 20 minutes to one minute while drastically reducing their overall resolution time thanks to Mattermost.
Not only that, they can meet their compliance obligations by making sure each incident is fully logged and documented automatically.
If you support or manage external customers’ systems, you know that exceeding SLAs are critically important to maintaining the trust and happiness of your customer base.
Driving toward faster SLA response and resolution times seems like a perpetual goal in the space. This where some Mattermost users are able to build private secure spaces they can use to collaborate with their customers to solve problems quicker.
4. Beyond IT: equipment management
Don’t think that this is an IT-only play either.
Some of our largest customers are in traditional industries that deploy manufacturing or industrial equipment out into the field.
Imagine having to monitor and stay on top of equipment in some of the most remote locations on the planet. Our customers are using Mattermost to collect data, manage equipment and keep secure audit logs of the history of each asset.
All that data can be fed into a tool like Elasticsearch or Hadoop and analyzed to help become more predictive on equipment failures.
5. Secure central control plane for critical systems and data
Enterprises are not cookie-cutter. They are uniquely cluttered messes of legacy applications and modern components.
To be successful, you need a single pane of glass to pull these disparate systems together.
The other week, a customer told me his team really wants all of their communication side-by-side with all of their critical data and processes in a single system. This way, his boss gets more visibility into the business, making it easier to stay on top of dangerous situations.
If data is the currency of the modern world, tools like Mattermost are becoming the ATMs that are securely dispensing that data.
It’s exhilarating to see how many of our customers are moving behind first-generation integrations and starting to use Mattermost as a central control plan for the business and their data.
I would love to hear more about how you are using Mattermost to solve critical business problems, reduce response time, improve efficiency and speed access to data.
Drop me a line at [email protected] if you want to share your story. I look forward to hearing from you!
(Editor’s note: This post was written by Matt Yonkovit, Head of Customer Success at Mattermost, Inc. If you have any feedback or questions about How Customers Save Time and Money with Mattermost, please let us know.)
