Guerrilla RF is a company that prides itself on its agility – and it recently found a way to be agile with its website development that led to a partnership with Adobe.
By deploying Adobe’s web applications development platform, ColdFusion, in its own web development workflow, Guerrilla RF has cut down on the time associated with traditional website creation and optimization.
“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, vice president of marketing at Guerrilla RF, said. “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.”
Guerrilla RF has been providing feedback to Adobe as part of its agile development efforts, with Adobe featuring Guerrilla RF in a recent case study.
The case study highlights how Guerrilla RF used ColdFusion to launch a revamped web infrastructure in only five weeks. Guerrilla RF created over 200 iterative builds in record time, utilizing novel automated feedback loops to eliminate errors and minimize site loading times to less than one second. The redesigned website resulted in significant increases in page views, new user interactions and SEO ratings.
A website fit for a public company
Guerrilla RF – which recently announced it was going public, upgrading to a significantly larger space and creating over 50 new jobs – realized it had to have its website better reflect the services it offers.
“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,” Ryan Pratt, founder and CEO of Guerrilla RF, said. “That’s something we can teach from experience, and it has helped us become a dynamic force in the industry.”
Originally, Guerrilla RF’s website supported the company’s database needs, but it now needed to appeal to potential investors, new-hire candidates and a wider range of clients.
Guerrilla RF’s goal was to make the changes needed to appeal to these users, as well as drive traffic and optimize SEO, by June 2021, when the company could debut its new website at a trade show. Due to time limitations, Guerrilla RF’s IT team was drawn to Adobe’s ColdFusion, which touted automated, easy-to-learn features.
ColdFusion’s features included advanced package management solutions, automated installers and startup scripts.
“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,” Ahne said. “The interoperability of Adobe ColdFusion gives our small team a larger reach.”
Without error or downtime, Guerrilla RF’s IT team performed over 200 site-related builds in five weeks. These types of builds – including a documentation library, comprehensive search tools and specific pages for products – normally would have taken 12 to 16 weeks.
After debuting the new website at the June 2021 trade show, Guerrilla RF saw upticks in site traffic. In August 2021, page views increased by 42% and new users by 23%, and in September, page views increased 52% and new users by 38%. Load time has also been cut down to less than a second.
Efficiency and security for IT teams
Not only did ColdFusion allow Guerrilla RF to redesign its website with positive results, but it has also allowed the company’s IT team to increase the efficiency with which the teams work on projects.
Guerrilla RF's IT leaders trained two interns with no experience in writing code in ColdFusion. In less than a week, the two interns were able to draft and deploy code. This efficiency in training will benefit the Guerrilla RF team as it continues to hire new employees.
In the last three months, Guerrilla RF migrated to the latest version of ColdFusion, diving into the CI/CD pipeline, language features and Cloud features.
ColdFusion also provides a higher level of security and customization in website builds. Automated testing means that Guerrilla RF’s developers can constantly deploy new code without manual mistakes, as ColdFusion’s 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,” Brian Sappey, Guerrilla RF’s director of architecture, said. “Our developers get the time and the freedom to create the next brilliant solution that make our clients’ businesses better.”
In addition to ColdFusion, Guerrilla RF is using integrations with Jira Workflow to track individual project tasks, Jenkins as its continuous integration tool and GitHub as its source control system. The company plans to launch the Adobe Performance Monitoring Toolset and Adobe API Manager next year.
