Increased deployment frequency from 6/year to an average of 50 deployments a month
Reduced Delivery Lead Time from two months to seven hours (on average)
Cut Change Failure Rate from 6% to 3.5%
DORA-aligned teams grow 4.1x faster than bottom performers
Visma revolutionized its software delivery by adopting the Visma Cloud Delivery Model (VCDM) and embracing DevOps on Google Cloud, transitioning from siloed, slow deployments to rapid, efficient releases and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Visma revolutionized its software delivery by adopting the Visma Cloud Delivery Model (VCDM) and embracing DevOps on Google Cloud, transitioning from siloed, slow deployments to rapid, efficient releases and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Aiming to deliver value more quickly and frequently
Visma is a unique group of entrepreneurial companies expanding through acquisitions across Europe and Latin America, faced significant challenges in 2015 with a siloed organizational structure across development, quality assurance, and operations. The company operated with numerous business-critical applications in a mature market, where customers demanded the highest quality and short time to market. Visma recognized the constant risk of disruptors and the urgent need to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies and DevOps practices to remain competitive and lead the market. Visma's key technology goal was to change their work culture and methodology to deliver value more quickly and frequently, increase budget efficiency, and foster innovation by leveraging public cloud technology. They aimed to migrate older solutions to the public cloud and mandate cloud-native development for all new projects.
Visma Cloud Delivery Model: Accelerating performance with Google Cloud
Management sponsorship for measuring and improving engineering performance grew once we introduced the findings from the book Accelerate and DORA metrics. We also learned that to get good traction, the initiative must be motivated properly and approached both bottoms-up and top-down.
Mili Orucevic
AI Tech Lead, Visma
In response to its challenges, Visma developed the Visma Cloud Delivery Model (VCDM). This model is a comprehensive framework encompassing principles, organizational structure, work processes, and technical requirements for successful cloud service delivery, fundamentally based on DORA research. VCDM facilitates a self-serviced and assisted onboarding process for teams, including training for new roles like VCDM Service Owner and VCDM Infrastructure Engineer. All team members learn modern software engineering practices such as testing, development, release, monitoring, security, and incident handling.
VCDM enables teams to automatically track Engineering Performance (ENGP) metrics and achieve certifications like ISO-9001, 27001, and ISEA 3402-type 2.
By embracing DevOps, continuous delivery, and public cloud, Visma transformed its approach. The company migrated most of its older solutions to public cloud and mandated that all new projects be built cloud-native, enabling greater flexibility and innovation without significant upfront hardware investments. This shift has allowed teams to provision infrastructure, experiment more freely, and even track AI metrics, correlating them with DORA metrics. Through this extreme automation and streamlined processes, Visma now supports over 2.1 million customers and handles billions of API transactions across its services. The partnership with Google Cloud has involved valuable advice, best practices, tailored training, audits, and early access to tools like Google Jules.
Visma is a privately held company headquartered in Oslo, Norway, that provides cloud accounting, payroll, invoicing, and HR business software products. It employs over 17.5k people and serves more than 2.1 million customers across Europe and Latin America.
Industry: Technology
Location: Norway
Products: Google Cloud
