Tacton goes digital with Sumo Logic

Tacton, a global leader in enabling smart commerce for manufacturers, has adopted Sumo Logic as part of a digital transformation initiative taking place across software development, product delivery and business operations. Using Sumo Logic, the Tacton team has transitioned its business model from being a traditional on-premise software vendor over to becoming a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider, as well as improving its operations and team productivity.

  • Tuesday, 3rd December 2019 Posted 5 years ago in by Phil Alsop
In the move, Tacton achieved efficiency savings for trouble-shooting and reduced time to reconcile data, saving an estimated 30 minutes each time log data was reconciled compared to previous approaches every time the activity was needed. With multiple logging and analytics tasks required all the time, this quickly added up to a substantial time saving for Tacton’s developers. Secondly, Tacton achieved full visibility across the company’s IT infrastructure and stack for the first time, providing vital business intelligence data to the company’s product leadership team, opening up new revenue and product development opportunities.

 

Tacton is a market leader in the Configure Price Quote (CPQ) sector, helping manufacturers improve their efficiency when it comes to building and selling their products. Using CPQ, these companies can streamline their work with customers and ship their goods both faster and to meet planned profitability goals. Since 1998, the Tacton team has developed product configuration products that help manufacturers improve their sales processes and deliver their products. However, the company’s leadership team sought to change the business model to one based on SaaS.

 

To make this change, the Tacton team had to implement a completely new infrastructure stack to support customers running in the cloud, as well as change established processes around customer support, operations and security. After an initial cloud migration to Amazon Web Services, the Tacton cloud services team realised that data on how the new cloud infrastructure was operating would be essential to their future success. 

 

Lars Hasselrot, Team Lead Cloud Services at Tacton, said, “Observability was a key requirement after we completed our initial lift and shift migration into AWS, as we needed to get information on how well our infrastructure was performing. At the same time, this shift was essential to how we served customers in the future, so the data would be used across other teams as well. In the past, we used other providers as well as creating our own internal solution based on open source components, but they were more expensive and hard to maintain compared to the value we got from the data, so we knew we had to move to something new to break through those limiting factors. Sumo Logic had the best platform for us to gather data continuously and make it available across developers, operations, security, and business teams with the right context, in one place, all at the same time.”

 

Tacton implemented Sumo Logic to support observability across the company’s initial deployment of its critical product configuration product into the cloud using AWS. Sumo Logic collects data from all the application infrastructure that Tacton has in place, then provides that data in the right dashboards and formats for each team member based on their specific roles and requirements. 

 

“Sumo Logic has been great for us as a business – from helping the initial operational team around visibility into the application stack, to today when we have multiple teams using Sumo Logic. For example, our support and product management teams can see how customers are using the product – for support, they can automatically see what people are trying to do versus what they actually achieve, then provide the right support to help them be more productive; for the product team, they can develop new services based on what customers want to achieve,” continued Hasslerot.

 

The Tacton team is continuing its digital transformation with the second phase of its projects, including application optimisation, expansion of cloud security adoption and a move to microservices and containers. Sumo Logic will support these shifts over time by providing real time and continuous intelligence.

 

“Whenever a company goes through digital transformation initiatives, there are great opportunities to use data in new ways that are expected and planned, equally, unexpected opportunities can come up with other teams as well. Tacton’s expansion of data into multiple teams can support more efficient working and greater productivity; ultimately, these kinds of projects help companies build more profitable and productive operations. We are pleased to support the cloud services team at Tacton with their goals now and in the future,” said Mark Pidgeon, Vice President Technical Services EMEA at Sumo Logic.