Oetker Digital accelerates its digital transformation with Mattermost

After migrating from Hipchat to Mattermost, Oetker Digital was able to innovate faster for its legendary parent company. The platform helped globally dispersed teams stay unified, productive, and focused as they collaborated on bold new digital initiatives for the enterprise.

A time-honored brand goes digital

Founded in 1891, the Oetker Group is one of Europe’s largest family businesses with a portfolio of over 400 brands. The world has changed dramatically over the past 128 years, and the Oetker Digital division was created to help the enterprise succeed in the digital era. Oetker Digital combines the rich traditions of the Oetker Group with digital ideas, innovations, and business models, such as their Juit meal delivery service and Backen.de recipe resource.

The journey from Hipchat to Mattermost

Prior to Mattermost, Oetker Digital had been using Hipchat for team messaging. In addition, the team still used email heavily for project communications, particularly with other divisions of Oetker Group, which made workflows inefficient and slow. When Oetker Digital learned that Hipchat would be discontinued, they began looking for another solution.

For a global enterprise such as Oetker Group, data privacy is of paramount concern when evaluating any software or service. Oetker Digital had considered Slack, but the platform did not meet the enterprise’s strict compliance requirements. Mattermost offered a self-hosting solution with auditing and compliance controls that could be deployed to a private cloud or on-premise systems, giving the digital team full control over their communications data behind the firewall.

“We take data compliance very seriously, and Mattermost offered a self-hosted solution along with a modern messaging user experience.”

—Uwe Schroeter, IT Infrastructure Manager, Oetker Digital

Another key reason for choosing Mattermost was the platform’s flexibility. Oetker Digital would be able to configure teams and workspaces that correlate with their project setup in Confluence, as well as their organizational structure. They could also easily manage permissions to ensure that communications stay private for each team, and at the same time integrate users from other business units across the Oetker Group.

Fast setup, seamless data migration

For Oetker Digital, implementing Mattermost was quick and straightforward. The team found the platform documentation to be clear and easy to read, enabling them to get set up in less than a day, including configuring an integration with Active Directory. In addition, migrating from Hipchat to Mattermost was seamless. The team could move over messaging data, such as users, channels, and histories, in a few simple steps. A few months later, Oetker changed its DevOps infrastructure to Kubernetes and Docker, and the team was able to easily move their Mattermost instance to a Kubernetes cluster.

“Mattermost’s portability to Kubernetes was a really important feature for us. We could accomplish this shift within minutes, and now we can more easily manage all our systems in one place.”

—Uwe Schroeter, IT Infrastructure Manager, Oetker Digital

Customizing Mattermost with third-party integrations

After using Mattermost for some months, Oetker Digital began exploring a variety of integrations with third-party systems to help boost productivity and streamline workflows. One of the first integrations has been with their ticketing system in Jira. Now, the IT Help Desk staff can address issues faster thanks to notifications of new Jira tickets automatically posting to their Mattermost channel. Oetker’s Prometheus integration helps the team monitor system performance, and they are also evaluating plugins for PagerDuty and GitHub to help centralize deployment workflows.

Because Mattermost is open source, the platform offers even more opportunities for customization. Oetker Digital is just starting to look at ways to integrate more of their internal systems with Mattermost in order to create new operational efficiencies.

Modern messaging for digital innovation

With Mattermost, everyone stays connected and up-to-date in real time via a central communications hub that spans the four floors of their Berlin office, as well as collaborators working remotely or at various partner companies. Using Mattermost has helped the team greatly reduce the amount of internal emails that they send and receive.

Communication has also improved between Oetker Digital and other divisions within the wider Oetker Group. As the organization works with different teams around the world, they onboard new project collaborators to Mattermost. The platform makes it much easier to stay unified, focused, and productive as global teams collaborate on new initiatives that will drive the Oetker Group’s digital future.

About Oetker Digital

Oetker Digital combines the rich traditions of the Oetker Group with digital ideas, innovations, and business models. With over 30,000 employees, the Oetker Group ranks among the major European family businesses and operates in multiple business areas. Oetker Digital actively supports Oetker companies, such as Dr. Oetker, the Radeberger Group, and the Henkell Group, as they move into the digital future. The division identifies and develops new, sustainable business models that enhance the capability, agility, and focus of the Oetker Group.