As part of these larger infrastructure changes, Bonnier News wanted to focus on unifying its tech stack. Databases, data models, and legacy hardware from years of acquisitions created silos that made it difficult to access – and even harder to analyze – data consistently. "We had a data platform, but it was underused because of a bottleneck," says David Hatschek, Head of Development at Bonnier News. Users had to know Python or Scala to use the platform, which meant access was limited to six data engineers across the organization.

Because of this, other teams within the company, such as sales and marketing, had to wait up to six months for data reporting requests. "We rely on data to understand our customers and their needs, and we wanted that data to be part of every decision we made," adds Hatschek. "By migrating to Google Cloud, we were able to remove technical barriers to get our data into the hands of users across the company." With a plan ready, Bonnier was able to make the move to a new data platform in just six months.

This collaboration was initially projected to produce three data pipelines built by teams other than the data team and 10 pull requests for new data. The actual result was 4,900% greater than the goal with 150 pipelines and 160 pull requests since launch.

In addition to data management, the team has implemented Cloud Run to more easily deploy applications. "With Cloud Run, we don't have to deploy servers or review capacities. We can just act," Seitz shares. "In the past, we had to be prepared to spin up additional servers manually to accommodate traffic increases. Now, if big news breaks, we can be sure a reader that comes to one of our sites is seeing the most up-to-date version of the page with current, breaking news because we can scale."

One of these projects involved creating more targeted messaging to increase user engagement and login rates. The team was able to review data from Google Analytics in BigQuery, analyze it using Looker and Vertex AI, and gain a clearer understanding of which messaging campaigns had performed well in the past. The new messages succeeded in driving 76% of all visitors who saw them to log into their accounts.

With a scalable, flexible infrastructure in place, the organization has been able to consolidate its tech stack, reduce costs, and continue to grow at the same time. "Our local news platform started out managing two local newspapers, and now we have around 45," says Seitz. "Because our cloud-based infrastructure is so flexible, even though we've grown by more than 20x, our costs haven't to the same degree." As the number of brands under the Bonnier News umbrella grows beyond 45, the business is equipped to integrate new companies' tech stacks into its own infrastructure quickly and easily.