Connect-i achieves 40% faster development, enhanced security with GitLab

Connect-i, founded in 2008, operates in the highly competitive learning management system market but also offers advanced cyber security services, like penetration testing, for multinational companies, along with Drupal web design and development. Opigno, their flagship learning management system and main revenue driver, is used by more than 10,000 businesses and more than 1 million daily users around the world.

It’s business critical to the organization to keep Opigno not only running smoothly but updated with the latest features and meeting customer needs.

Standing in their way was a fragmented toolchain that caused disjointed processes and limited visibility into their CI/CD pipelines. With just two engineers supporting a platform used by millions, Connect-i’s DEvSecOps team was overwhelmed by time-consuming manual tasks. Developing and deploying updates was slow, tedious, and error-prone — making it difficult to keep their enterprise platform competitive and their premier product up to date. For a company delivering mission-critical software to global organizations, this gap between capabilities and expectations had to be rectified.

In 2022, they adopted the Community Edition of GitLab's DevSecOps platform, switching from a complicated patchwork of tools that included the Packagist repository, Bitbucket, and Jenkins. This consolidation into a single platform immediately streamlined their development processes and eliminated integration headaches.

Then in 2023 they upgraded to GitLab Premium to take advantage of even more features and capabilities, like customer support services, strengthened security and control features, and additional project management functionality. That move enabled them to increase efficiencies, eliminate wasted time, and ensure security is a primary focus from the very beginning of development. It also allowed them to make a 30% reduction in their security workload.

“The quality of our software has improved significantly,” says Axel Minck, CEO at Connect-i. “Having everything — code, issues, CI/CD, and testing — in one place helped us speed up our work by 30% to 40%. It’s made collaboration easier, reduced errors, and allowed us to release updates quickly, especially for our enterprise version, where quality and speed really matter.”

Connect-i used GitLab to create new features in two successive versions of Opigno. Now they are working on another major version release, building it from the ground up with the DevSecOps platform. “We’re managing the full development lifecycle in GitLab — everything from code development to reviews, quality control, documentation, and customized CI/CD pipelines with linting code analysis and testing,” adds Minck. “GitLab has been essential to transforming this product, giving us full control over every aspect of development and ensuring it is high quality.”

He also notes that they’re building software faster and more efficiently, since manual tasks that used to take days now are done within hours thanks to automation. And they’re also more confident that the code is more secure with built-in container scanning, Static Application Security Testing and Dynamic Application Security Testing.

“Without a doubt, centralizing our workflows in GitLab has eliminated unnecessary context switching and toolchain overhead,” says Minck. “It all plays a major role in enabling us to catch vulnerabilities early — both in the code and the infrastructure. That’s critical for us and our enterprise clients, who expect secure, compliant software.”

These efficiencies — created with automation, built-in security, and streamlining — are just what a small business needs to add muscle to a two-person team, allowing them to leverage limited resources and deliver an outsized impact.

“With a really small team, GitLab enables us to do more with fewer hands,” says Minck. “That’s absolutely critical. With the platform, routine tasks, like testing, deploying, and scanning, are automated so everything runs more smoothly and takes less time and effort. It allows us to do more with fewer resources, enabling us to meet customer expectations, better compete against larger businesses and expand our market reach. It gives a small business more muscle.”

By getting rid of previous problems like context switching, fragmentation, and the management challenges their old toolchain was causing, Connect-i’s DevSecOps team is saving time and expenses. Actually, they saved more than 1,400 hours of development time in the past one and a half years.

“With GitLab bringing everything into a single, unified platform, we’re no longer spending time doing the same manual tasks over and over, says Minck. “Now our team can focus more on what actually matters — writing code, improving security, optimizing performance, and delivering features faster. We're also investing more time refining our DevSecOps practices and automating compliance tasks, which directly benefits our internal operations and client satisfaction.”

With GitLab's built-in security capabilities, automation, and documentation, Connect-i's small team can implement enterprise-grade security and compliance practices that normally would require a dedicated team. Remaining compliant with a myriad of certifications and standards is a big job for a company of any size — even large enterprises — so making this job easier and more efficient is a huge boost.

Connect-i works with enterprise clients that expect the organization and its software to remain in accordance with government practices and mandates, like ISO 27001, an internationally recognized standard for managing sensitive company information, like financial data, intellectual property, and employee details.

GitLab’s platform — with integrated security checks, access control, compliance dashboards, and audit trails built directly into workflows — helps Connect-i remain compliant. And audit logs and automated evidence collection help the organization easily and quickly prove that it has been compliant.

“GitLab helps us enforce policies, manage access, and generate the necessary audit trails that make aligning with international standards easier. It would have been difficult to manage this manually,” adds Minck, noting it gives them the high level of transparency and traceability their clients demand. “Making compliance efforts straightforward and efficient have notably reduced stress on our team and improved productivity, directly contributing to overall job satisfaction and happiness.”

Effective collaboration is essential for any software development team, whether the team is made up of two people or 2,000. It’s also a key way to not only keep developers happy but to be able to retain and attract top talent.

Having a whole different level of transparency, along with built-in tools for issue tracking, planning, and documentation have helped bridge the gap between developers, security engineers, and even project managers. And this goes beyond work on Opigno, affecting all of the software the organization is creating.

Using GitLab’s DevSecOps Platform, Connect-i also has fostered teamwork not only among its engineers, but also between people in different departments. While the organization’s core DevSecOps team is small, they collaborate with the product team, project managers, sales, and even external partners. GitLab has streamlined how all of these contributors participate in the development process, allowing others to contribute and ensuring developers know exactly what is needed.

And that has made a big difference not just for creating software but for the company as a whole.

“The quality of our software has improved significantly and part of that is directly related to our ability to collaborate,” says Minck. “GitLab's unified platform has made it much easier for developers to collaborate on code, track progress, review merge requests, and share feedback — all in one place. Now everyone has visibility into the pipeline, which encourages more open and efficient communication.”

“It's had a big impact on cross-functional teams,” the CEO says. “With better collaboration, decisions are made faster, blockers are resolved more quickly, and there's a shared understanding of priorities. That leads to more predictable development cycles, fewer surprises during deployment, and better coordination when pushing updates to production.”

That collaboration, along with improved efficiency, security, and ease of compliance, is benefitting Connect-i as a whole.

“It all means better software, faster delivery, and happier teams,” says Minck. “It allows us to react more quickly to client needs, reduces rework, and strengthens trust between departments. Ultimately, that boosts our overall productivity and helps us deliver more value to our clients. In a space where clients expect both innovation and trustworthiness, GitLab helps us meet those expectations and stand out from the competition.”