Bridge to Possibili-Tea

Company Information

Company Name: Bridge To Possibili-Tea
Founded: 1995
Annual Recurring Revenue: Approximately $250m per year

Story

Founded in 1995 with a single location in a college town in North Carolina. Popularity quickly grew with expansion to 50 locations (primarily in college towns). In 2008, they launched their first eCommerce site. Eventually, in 2017 the organization decided to focus their efforts on online sales by strengthening their partnership with other non-tea beverage companies and closing their retail locations.

With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, orders exploded. Fortunately, because the company had a vertical monopoly throughout the supply chain, they did not experience supply chain issues like others did. However, the explosive growth has had a major impact on the eCommerce business, and customers are starting to switch to other vendors. Issues have ranged from incorrectly provisioned infrastructure to SLA violations from the company’s 3rd party providers to rushed deployments that resulted in issues with their eCommerce application.

Previously, the company’s technology team worked in various siloed groupings focused on specific areas such as application, infrastructure, cloud, and security. To address these growing issues, Bridge to Possibili-Tea is undertaking a two-fold effort: to procure a solution that provides end-to-end visibility from the customer’s vantage point through the online presence, and to better unify the technology team’s various pillars behind a common language and goal.

Notable People

Jayson – Chief Executive Officer and Founder

An avid tea connoisseur, Jayson started Bridge to Possibili-Tea in 1995 with a location in downtown Durham, NC. His Michigan roots prompted him to expand to Ann Arbor a couple of years later. The popularity quickly grew, and other locations soon popped up throughout the country.

In 2008, his company launched their eCommerce site, and business continued to flourish. By 2017, 75% of the company’s business was being conducted online, and he moved the focus from brick-and-mortar locations to completely online transactions. His continued investment in technology along with partnerships with other non-tea beverage companies paid dividends as the company saw dramatic growth.

The pandemic in 2020 changed a lot of things. The explosion of transactions from people who were locked down was initially good for the business. However, technology issues soon started plaguing the company, causing declines in revenues.

Aayush – Chief Technology Officer

Prior to his arrival at Bridge to Possibili-Tea in 2015, Aayush was a leader in the the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) division at a major technology company. During his tenure at Bridge to Possibili-Tea, Aayush has overseen the digital transformation from a brick-and-mortar based business to a wholly online vendor.

His organization has been undertaking a massive project to decommission their data centers by migrating their workloads to the cloud. In 2020, the pandemic led to a massive increase in product orders. As a result, the exponential increase in traffic has led to numerous issues causing impact to the performance of their online presence. This worries business leaders who are starting to see a dip in expected revenues.

To address this, Aayush has mandated his direct leadership team to fundamentally change how their respective teams work together towards a singular goal – to having the best teastore out on the internet today.

Savi – Senior Director, Security and Cyberdefense

Savi joined Bridge to Possibili-Tea in 2017 to lead efforts in securing the enterprise. Her previous background as a leader at a prestigious cyberdefense company has aided in establishing best practices for securing Bridge to Possibili-Tea.

The explosion in orders has shined a spotlight on the company, and hackers have taken notice. There have been numerous detected attempts at breaching infrastructure that have so far been thwarted. However, the rapid pace of development and microservice releases have exposed a potential hole in defenses. Savi’s responsibility is to ensure that application development teams have visibility into where potential exploits may lie while helping her team of security experts understand the business impact and context of breaches.

Eddie – Director, Tech Infrastructure and Operations

Eddie joined Bridge to Possibili-Tea in 2016 as an infrastructure engineer. In the next 2-3 years, he moved up the ranks to eventually run the infrastructure and cloud ops organization. He is a key figure in the project to migrate the eCommerce application from their on-premise datacenter into the cloud. This project is estimated to save over $350k per year in infrastructure costs.

The pandemic has brought an interesting challenge to his team. With the exponential increase in load, he has to find a delicate balance of right-sizing his cloud infrastructure while continuing to keep the application running at an optimal level.

Erin – Director, Applications and Monitoring

Erin is in the middle of a digital transformation effort that involves a hybrid environment with canary testing and re-factoring into microservices.

This effort was sold internally within Bridge to Possibili-Tea as the way to stop customer churn observed during the pandemic due to customer experience degradation triggered by increase in business volume

With competition attempting to break into their grasp on the market, Erin and her team are moving to a more rapid pace of development and release of new features.

Antonio – Lead DevOps Engineer

Re-factoring Bridge-To-Posibili-Tea’s application has taken Antonio on a journey of using third party services that allows his team to focus on the features that really impact the business bottom line while some of the needed functionalities are fulfilled by services provided by other companies.

His team is also using cloud infrastructure extensively including Kubernetes because it decouples developers and operations from deploying to specific machines and it significantly simplifies day-to-day operations by abstracting the underlying infrastructure.

Antonio has been facing challenges to gain visiblility into the dependencies of the application as well as the details of what’s happening with the Kubernetes clusters they are running both On-Prem and in the Cloud.

Randall – Lead Infrastructure / CloudOps Engineer

Randall is the Lead Infrastructure/CloudOps engineer and oversees hybrid architectures in the cloud migration initiative Eddie is driving. Randall is in charge of identifying potential cloud migration components within Bridge-To-Posibili-Tea’s production environment based on potential performance gains and cost reductions.

He needs to understand how changes made to infrastructure are impacting the business bottom line with a reliable feedback loop early on in his decision process that will free up resources while securing performance.

Ali – Lead SecOps Engineer

High double digits growth during the pandemic also brought its own challenges to ‘Bridge to Possibili-Tea’. The business is not only seeing cut-throat competition but also multiple security incidents every day from adversaries. Different technical teams working in silos didn’t make things easier for anyone.

Ali was hired to solve the following pain points:

• Reduce the time to detection from days/months to minutes
• Protect the application against attacks in real time
• Identify vulnerabilities and threats within the applications in production and suggest suitable remediation steps
• Reduce the attack surface by collaborating efficiently with other teams to fix the vulnerabilities and mitigate the threats
• To share the security context that would help in prioritizing remediation tasks based on business impact

Next  

We’ll learn more about why Bridge to Possibili-Tea eventually selected Cisco to provide full stack observability.