KLARNA: Growing with upKeeper
Swedish startup-success Klarna has made shopping easier for us since 2005. Even behind the scenes they are all for simplifying their operations and upKeeper is an important part of helping them do just that in their IT environment.
Payment service company Klarna was founded in 2005 on the idea to make shopping easier for everybody. And they’ve succeded – today Klarna is one Sweden’s most successful start-ups and one of Europe’s fastest growing companies with a 2.8 billion SEK turnover in 2015. Klarna is now used in 18 countries and emplys some 1,200 employees.
upKeeper has been a part of Klarna’s history for 6 years. Because even behind the scenes everything at Klarna is about simplifying and increasing efficiency. Today more than 1000 of Klarna’s workstations are managed using upKeeper. We talked to Kristofer Karlsson, support technician at Klarna.
-We use upKeeper to install Windows on all our PCs and to package and deploy all applications on Windows, Kristofer tells us.We also use upKeeper to be able to associate users to computers, which helps us to determine, for example, at which computer a user is working right now.
“You can make big changes in a short amount of time and you can customize everything according to your needs.”
Kristofer Karlsson, Klarna
From manual to automatic – the mega time saver!
Before Klarna started using upKeeper they installed everything manually from cd-roms, something that was very time-consuming.
– If you install from a cd it will take you at least two hours of active time for every computer. Then if you take into account the passive time it will take a whole working day to prepare a computer without upKeeper. Now we can do all that within an hour, which is an enormous time-saver, says Kristofer.
An application you want to install on 500 computers is a natural thing to package with upKeeper, but since it saves so much time and is so easy to do, Kristofer usually packages any application he knows he will install more than twice.
– Since packaging applications can be done both easily and quickly, it will save you a lot of time both immediately and in the long run.
Managing all your software with upKeeper
Being able to assign applications to groups makes it easier to replace and update applications, which also speeds up your day-to-day work.
Having up-to-date operating systems, drivers and applications is important for any company and especially so for companies like Klarna that work in the financial sector. At Klarna upKeeper is used for all software updates.
– All our third-party applications are updated every week, which is also something that’s possible only because we use upKeeper, says Kristofer Karlsson.
With the help of upKeeper, we have also automated the installation of all new computers, so when we hand over a computer to one of our employees it always comes with the latest versions of all third-party applications, bios and drivers.
I think upKeeper’s biggest strength is that it’s easy to use and customizable. Additionally, it’s very responsive: you know when things happen and that they happen fast. You can make big changes in a short amount of time and you can customize everything according to your needs.