Intense Competition With Owning Market Share
Since 1926, Kelley Blue Book (KBB) has been the leading vehicle valuation and information source. Trusted by both consumers and the automotive industry, KBB provides the most heavily-referenced values in the industry on its top-rated website.
However, strong competition and the constraints of their existing platform were creating significant roadblocks. The team needed to accelerate innovation and reduce product time-to-market. Still, their deployment schedule was limited to only twice a week, a pace too slow to compete effectively and own market share.
- Slow Time-to-Market: The company needed to increase innovation, but lengthy testing cycles and a rigid deployment schedule were holding them back.
- Architectural Limitations: The existing platform could not support the new micro-services architecture blueprint required to build more agile, scalable solutions.
- Inability to Deploy On-Demand: The reliance on extensive manual testing prevented the team from deploying new features and updates on demand.
To protect its market leadership, KBB needed a strategic partner to guide a complete technological and cultural transformation: migrating to the cloud, adopting an automation-first mindset, and fundamentally transforming its development and delivery processes.
A Dedicated Partner for Full-Scale Transformation
KMS Technology engaged as a key engineering partner to drive KBB’s ambitious transformation goals. We provided the expertise to overhaul their infrastructure, processes, and culture, enabling them to deliver industry-leading solutions at a much faster pace.
Our team began by supporting a 100% cloud migration strategy to AWS. The move was a foundational shift from the current legacy system to a modern, flexible micro-services architecture. While building the new cloud-native infrastructure, our team also worked to maintain the existing monolith platform until the shift was complete, ensuring a seamless transition.
To enable on-demand deployments, KMS Technology led the charge to adopt an automation-first mindset. We unified ALM tools across Scrum teams and built out a long-term automation strategy that enabled the team to deploy product tests on demand.
Throughout development, our team implemented smart Agile practices, including continuous planning and Lean development, across all teams to speed up time-to-market and increase delivery efficiency. The partnership has fostered a highly-engaged and productive engineering environment, resulting in a low product team attrition rate and an upsurge in productivity.
Turning Technology Achievements into Business Growth
The partnership with KMS successfully transformed Kelley Blue Book’s engineering capabilities, turning their technology platform into a true competitive advantage. By embracing the cloud and a culture of automation, KBB is now able to innovate faster, respond more quickly to market changes, and deliver industry-leading solutions at speed.
The results are a clear testament to the success of the transformation. With 100% cloud adoption, KBB now has a scalable and resilient foundation for growth. The automation-first strategy delivered a 70% test automation rate within the first year and a reduction of over 25% regression test cycles. This efficiency gain fueled 250+ deployments per month, empowering KBB to deploy features on-demand.
“KMS has been a key factor in the success of Kelley Blue Book. We are able to flex and scale our engineering capabilities by leveraging the KMS team, which enables us to deliver industry-leading solutions.”
By partnering with KMS Technology, KBB gained the strategic guidance, technical expertise, and engineering scale they need to achieve their transformation goals and accelerate their path to innovation.