Giving small teams a massive reach.
Guerrilla RF uses Adobe ColdFusion to launch a revitalized web infrastructure in only five weeks.
200
Website-related builds in five weeks
Products:
Objectives
Launch new web infrastructure in compressed timeframe
Create faster website with better client experiences Increase accuracy and speed of coding
Reduce time and cost of training new developers
Results
Completed new website in five weeks
Reduces load time to less than one second
Automates feedback loops to eliminate human interaction and error
Compresses developer training to a few days
Bringing agility into every area of business
Every company, regardless of industry or size, has a guiding principle. For Guerrilla RF, that principle is agility — the ability to outmaneuver larger competitors by looking at the underdeveloped, but still crucial, wireless market segments. As a smaller firm in the semiconductor industry, Guerrilla RF must be agile with available resources to make the difference between merely surviving and instead thriving in a competitive industry.
“When we look to underdeveloped niches, like small cells, carrier-class Wi-Fi, and wireless backhaul, we’re showing our clients, even larger clients in the automotive industry or military contracting, how to maximize their resources and work smarter,” says Ryan Pratt, Founder and CEO of Guerrilla RF. “That’s something we can teach from experience and it has helped us become a dynamic force in the industry.”
That emphasis on agility has already made Guerrilla RF a leading manufacturer of Radio Frequency and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (RFICs and MMICs, respectively) and innovator in fabless design. However, the firm is increasingly challenged to take that same spirit of nimble, creative thinking and apply it inward.
Rising from an established start-up into a rapid-growth phase, Guerrilla RF had to take stock of its own areas for development. The Guerrilla RF team quickly realized that it needed its external presence to better reflect the services it can offer clients. The company had to transform its branding, starting with its website.
Building a smarter, faster website
Originally, engineering teams developed the website to support the company’s database needs and cater to other engineers. Now, the website had to resonate with diverse users like potential investors, new-hire candidates, and key client decision makers such as procurement personnel.
Developing site designs and material that felt customized for these user groups — while addressing other core concerns, like driving traffic and optimizing SEO — required dramatic changes to the original flow and hierarchy of the website. These changes went beyond what the modest Guerrilla RF IT team, which also had other roles within the organization, could accomplish in time for the company to make its new website debut at a pivotal trade show in June 2021.
After it became apparent that the best option was finding a fast, efficient way to create a brand-new site, Guerrilla RF searched for a rapid web application development platform that could support new site structures while enhancing overall scalability.
The team was drawn to the easy-to-use, easy-to-learn features and enhanced automation of Adobe ColdFusion. They saw that the advanced package management solution, improved startup times, as well as automated installers and startup scripts in Adobe ColdFusion would let its teams complete work faster than other environments.
“With Adobe ColdFusion, we can automate the painstaking work of deploying new processes and improvements and focus on the customization that shows we’re thinking about who our clients are and what they need,” says Jim Ahne, VP of Marketing. “The interoperability of Adobe ColdFusion gives our small team a larger reach.”
The Guerrilla RF team performed over 200 site-related builds — with no errors or downtime — in just five weeks. Compared to other platforms, the ease of use and high volume of online trainings that came with adopting Adobe ColdFusion freed Guerrilla RF from constraints around developer availability, training requirements, and app development timeframes. Using other tech stacks, that build might have taken the team anywhere between 12 and 16 weeks. Relying on the agility and rapid development capabilities of Adobe ColdFusion, the team was empowered to make faster decisions and try small, iterative changes that helped them refine the process of targeting individual audiences.
Adobe ColdFusion allowed Guerrilla RF to create a modern, visually dynamic web infrastructure with a robust documentation library, comprehensive search tools, and product-specific pages and sub-pages, while cutting load time down to less than a second.
Guerrilla RF also explored more advanced functions in Adobe ColdFusion, like customer relationship management toolsets and the ability to develop additional applications, to create a more secure, firewalled site expressly for investors tied into the main corporate page.
After using Adobe ColdFusion to rapidly create a new website that highlighted the full scope of its services, Guerrilla RF attended the June 2021 trade show. Soon afterward, Guerrilla RF saw upticks in site traffic: For August 2021, page views increased by 42% and the volume of new users rose by 23%. Just one month later, the website had an even bigger traffic spike. For September 2021, page views rose another 10 points to 52%, and new users increased by 38%.
“Adobe ColdFusion has been a game changer for almost every area of our business, from the way we market ourselves to the ways we think about training and teamwork.”
Jim Ahne
VP of Marketing, Guerrilla RF
Empowering small teams to make a big difference
Using Adobe ColdFusion, Guerrilla RF has done more than revitalize its presence to clients online, it dramatically changed the speed and efficiency in how its teams work on projects across the board.
Since Adobe ColdFusion is so simple to use, Guerrilla RF IT leaders trained two interns with no experience in writing code to draft and deploy code in less than a week. Among more seasoned engineers, the process is even faster. Leadership can train these engineers how to deploy code through Adobe ColdFusion in a matter of days, producing immediate benefits in hiring and training new team members. In reducing the time and cost of the onboarding process, Guerrilla RF continues to build a lean, agile team that produces high quality websites and applications in a short period of time. With Adobe ColdFusion, Guerrilla RF teaches new hires how to make quick changes and sample their work—allowing them to keep a constant cycle of open feedback.
Guerrilla RF migrated to the latest version of Adobe ColdFusion as it ramped up plans for growth. In three months, the company has delved extensively into the CI/CD pipeline, language features, and Cloud features and found minimal errors and roadblocks in delivering the main corporate website as well as an investor website.
Though Adobe ColdFusion makes it easier for developers to duplicate and manage code, the process also comes with greater security and customization. Seamless automated testing through Adobe ColdFusion lets Guerrilla RF developers continually deploy new code without introducing manual mistakes—in fact, automated feedback loops can perform penetration tests, simulate attacks, and provide health checks.
“The powerful automation of Adobe ColdFusion means that developers don’t ever have to log-in to a production server, which is a tremendous advantage in cost savings, downtime, and risk of error,” says Brian Sappey, Director of Architecture. “Our developers get the time and the freedom to create the next brilliant solution that make our clients’ businesses better.”
Integrations with Jira Workflow give Guerrilla RF the power to track any individual project task in real time and provide business owners with the most accurate build times for projects at every scale. The company is also using Jenkins as its continuous integration tool and GitHub as its source control system. Guerrilla RF is excited to keep pushing the limits of what it can accomplish with Adobe ColdFusion, with plans to launch the Adobe Performance Monitoring Toolset and Adobe API Manager in 2022.
“Adobe ColdFusion has been a game changer for almost every area of our business, from the way we market ourselves to the ways we think about training and teamwork,” says Ahne. “Agility means finding and embracing the very best ways to work, and in Adobe ColdFusion, we’ve found an incredible development tool which intensifies our ability to outpace the competition.”