Simply Business moves from Jenkins to Semaphore, streamlining its enterprise CI
😔 Before Semaphore:
- ⛔️️ Issues with maintaining a Jenkins server
- ⛔️ No full-featured and reliable CI solution
😄 After adopting Semaphore:
- ✅ Lower maintenance costs and increased speed and efficiency
- ✅ Successful adoption of CI
Discover what Semaphore can do for your team 🧑💻
Launched in 2005, Simply Business is an online brokerage service, delivering policies tailored to individual business requirements. The UK’s largest business insurance provider, they provide insurance to over 300,000 UK SMEs, covering over 1,000 trade types. It has been a Sunday Times Tech Track 100 company for the past three years and was recently named in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA.
The Challenge
Simply Business is the UK’s largest online insurance broker for small businesses. They are primarily an online company — all of their customers come through their website. Thanks to this model, they have been growing rapidly, issuing policies to hundreds of thousands of clients.
In business insurance, efficiency is at the very core of the business. In 2010, the IT team faced the challenge of needing to speed up adding new functionality to their online insurance platform. Lukas Oberhuber joined Simply Business as their CTO to help the tech team adopt the agile methodology and increase the scope, speed, and efficiency of their service.
“We were using Jenkins to build the old system, and it was hard to maintain and quite painful. We looked at other hosted CI services, but they were very unreliable. When we found Semaphore, we got our application up and running pretty quickly. We now use it for all projects. ”
Lukas Oberhuber, CTO at Simply Business
The Solution
There are a lot of details that need to be taken into account when testing an enterprise-class system. Simply Business managed to resolve all of the complexities involved using Semaphore for continuous integration. Another important benefit for them was that Semaphore constantly adds new features, such as Docker support.
“I think that the biggest benefit is that we don’t have to maintain a bespoke build environment and deal with the hassle of maintaining it. The integration with GitHub is absolutely crucial. The fact that any time you push something, it just goes straight to Semaphore.”
Lukas Oberhuber, CTO at Simply Business
The Simply Business tech team recently came across an interesting challenge of needing to be able to continuously deploy the phone system during the day, while their staff are on the phone, talking to customers. Nobody does test-driven development with Twilio, so the team had a great feeling of success when they managed to test a Twilio integration including WebRTC using Semaphore.
The Results
All of Simply Business’s new projects are tested and continuously delivered, and they’re all running on Semaphore for testing purposes.
“Semaphore is easy to set up, and it suited us really well throughout the years. Semaphore developers have been very responsive to support queries — early on, we had quite a few discussions about how to do certain things, and that’s been really helpful. Semaphore just works.”
Lukas Oberhuber, CTO at Simply Business
Simply Business is one of the UK’s largest business insurance providers. Fast, flexible cover for small businesses and landlords
www.simplybusiness.co.uk/ 
Industry
Online insurance
More customer stories
“Semaphore 2.0 allows us to build, tag, push, and run Docker images easily. This makes building a powerful pipeline where we can deploy to our Kubernetes cluster fairly easily and quickly.”
Nic Cavigliano
Senior Software Engineer
“It’s way faster and we just pay Semaphore for the number of build seconds we actually use. As we’ve spent a bit of time optimizing our build speed, each build costs about 10 cents.”
Conrad Irwin
CTO / Co-Founder
“Semaphore allows us to build anywhere from two to twenty branches in parallel, each one in a threaded environment. We had thousands of tests that were running for a really long time and with Semaphore we got the build to run in under 20 minutes.”
Artem Lypiy
QA Lead at 500px