Cirrus Insight: Access to Mac Software For Testing and Service with Mac mini

About Cirrus Insight

Founded in 2011, Cirrus Insight is a sales enablement platform for Gmail and Outlook that offers an all-in-one sales productivity platform with Salesforce integration. With more than 250,000 users, Cirrus Insight helps to increase productivity through email tracking, email templates, drip campaigns, follow-up reminders, meeting scheduling, and attachment tracking. Cirrus Insight has been on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies for three consecutive years.

About Cirrus Insight’s Developer Team

Cirrus Insight’s suite of products runs across multiple mail servers and email clients. Each mail integration has its own app with a lightweight interface that works within the mail client’s features and limitations. Common user interface and processes are run from central APIs or dashboards and are shared among the client applications. The team at Cirrus Insight relies on automated testing and continuous integration to ensure stable releases across the many codebases that must be published with each new feature.

The team delivers valuable innovations to customers using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Driving the team is a collection of agile behaviors and sound technical practices, including Built-in Quality, Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Agile Testing, and Test-Driven Development (TDD).

How Cirrus Insight Uses their Mac mini

Cirrus Insight uses a cloud-hosted Mac mini to deploy and test the Outlook for Mac integration to ensure any new features will work when implemented for Mac. MacStadium provides a vital service – when a developer who uses a Windows machine needs to test, they use the Mac mini to test.

Having a Mac mini also helps when customer service needs to solve an issue. Cirrus Insight’s customers span a diverse environment from how they deploy Outlook across Windows, Mac, and web access. 

It’s a similar situation internally. While employees can choose between a Windows or Mac machine, customer service needs to support customers running Outlook for Mac, no matter which operating system their computer is running on. Therefore, if an issue needs to be solved, customer service can use the MacStadium machine to help customers, no matter what their device is. The goal is a confident, stable performance on all platforms Cirrus Insight supports, ensuring that products only need to be built once and can run anywhere.

Cirrus Insight’s Experience with MacStadium

“We were considering other options, like Parallels for Mac, but we needed Mac on Windows. We needed a virtual machine locally or in the cloud and on-demand (versus having two machines) to install, deploy, test software, and reproduce bugs. We couldn’t find anything that did exactly what we wanted until we found MacStadium. They were the perfect solution to solve our specific problem,” said Phil Dixon, CEO of Cirrus Insight.

“They’re a very responsive team if we ever have any issues. They give a lot of detail and respond right away,” said Eric Karlson, Customer Support Engineer for Cirrus Insight.

In Good Company

Like Cirrus Insight, many customers need macOS for testing to ensure that their customers get the best experience possible with their products. For that, clients like Cirrus Insight have time and time again chosen MacStadium. We’re excited to see what new opportunities the new year brings for Cirrus Insight! Have a similar story to tell? Let us know!

Special thanks to Maddy Osman with Cirrus Insight for collaborating with us on this blog post!