Bandwidth.com's War on Celery

Last week, we shared with you some highlights from our recent conversation with Bandwidth.com — a leading CPaaS provider and partner to Google, Zoom and other companies — about how Strongpoint helps them prepare for audits. But we left out a great story that shows how they add a little fun into the compliance process.

It's a story about celery. 

You see, when we sat down with Bandwidth to review how they were using our change management system, we started noticing something… odd... about their change approvals.

Every Strongpoint change request includes an approval comment section where users can provide additional context as part of the approval process. In Bandwidth’s case, however, the team started using it to share bizarre facts and hot takes — including one executive approver's thoughts on celery, which ended up being exceptionally polarizing. It began with the unexpected fact that you burn more calories from eating celery than you get from consuming it. This quickly degraded into good-humored sniping, as people took sides on the celery question!

What started as an inside joke quickly became part of their culture. It had some unexpected side effects, too. 

“Every year we meet with our auditors, they want us to go through selections with them, and they want to do a sample of them live. It’s always funny to see them try to be professional when reading our comments!” Financial Analyst Robert Barker told us. 

Whether you’re pro-celery, anti-celery or celery-agnostic, anyone can agree that watching auditors squirm is always fun. However, the bigger takeaway — at least for us — was that Strongpoint was making the Bandwidth team’s job so easy, no additional comments were necessary. 

As our CEO, Mark Walker, put it in the video, with Strongpoint, “you don’t do work for the auditors. You do your work to do your  job — and out of that comes really great information for the auditors.”

In Bandwidth’s case, their auditors were already getting the reports they needed to validate their change processes. And the Bandwidth team got to focus on the issues that really matter, while also poking fun at vegetables. Today, it’s celery, but tomorrow it could be cabbage, Brussels sprouts or even turnips.

Watch the video to learn more: