.jpg)
About Cimpress
Cimpress plc (Nasdaq: CMPR) is a global leader in mass customization, empowering their entrepreneurial customers to create individually meaningful, personalized physical products with near mass production efficiency.
With over two decades of innovation, Cimpress encompasses a portfolio of over a dozen entrepreneurial businesses, including well-known brands Vistaprint, Drukwerkdeal, and Pixartprinting, among others. Each operates autonomously, with strategic cohesion achieved through select shared activities.
The challenge
As a group of autonomous businesses under a unifying structure, Cimpress faced challenges rooted in a diverse and sprawling ecosystem of internal tools and processes. Some of their key pain points included:
- Overwhelming Tooling Diversity: A zoo of pre-imposed, autonomously tooled, and in-house built/maintained tools created inconsistency
- Low Workflow Standardization: A lack of a unified approach to workflows, processes, and how tooling and configurations are set and utilized led to inefficiencies at all levels
- Suffering Developer Experience: Developers face a high cognitive load due to the complexity of their day-to-day environment, resulting in low developer productivity and a daunting picture for every new developer onboarded
These critical challenges underscored an urgent need for Cimpress to find a standardized and developer-friendly approach to internal tooling and workflows.
The solution
Recognizing the need for a true transformation, Nicholas Merritt, Director of Technology at Cimpress, spearheaded the creation and adoption of Platform Engineering philosophy with a new internal developer platform (IDP). Nicholas put the Humanitec Platform Orchestrator and Score at the centre of the IDP’s design, and utilized the experience of the Humanitec team to follow best-practices and have a clear adoption path.
The Humanitec Platform Orchestrator was utilized to:
- Act as the backend foundation for the IDP, orchestrating platform components and managing resource definitions
- Enable seamless resource allocation and lifecycle management, reducing the need for developers to engage with complex infrastructure and configurations
With Score, Cimpress was able to:
- Provide developers with a code-based, self-service interface to define dependencies for their workloads
- Simplify the interactions with infrastructure by abstracting the underlying tooling and complexity, reducing cognitive load
- Standardize how workloads and resources are configured and deployed across teams
The Platform Engineering team at Cimpress leverages the Platform Orchestrator to house and define their required resource definitions. Developers, in turn, interact with the IDP through Score files, which are easy to learn and maintain. This approach ensures streamlined workflows, low barriers to onboarding, and a consistent developer experience across distributed teams.
Cimpress’ new Humanitec-centric IDP has revolutionized how developers interact with infrastructure, enabling:
- Increased developer productivity: Developers are now focused more on building features, and less on navigating complex tooling landscapes
- Reduced onboarding time: New developers can ramp up quickly with standardized workflows and intuitive tools
- Enhanced workflow consistency: Unified tooling and configurations ensure smoother collaboration across teams, with lower operational overhead
Lower cognitive load: Developers interact with a simple, user-friendly interface designed for them, freeing mental capacity for problem-solving and innovation
Timeline and evaluation
Target architecture design: 2 weeks
Platform MVP delivered: 6 Weeks
Full integration: 16 weeks
34 new applications onboarded
Onboarding a new developer: 1 Day
