Founded over 70 years ago, Amplifon is the global leader in the hearing care retail industry and  provides highly personalized hearing care solutions to empower people to rediscover all the emotions of sound. With 18,600 employees providing hearing care for over 5 million customers worldwide, Amplifon faces the challenge of delivering world-class products and services that meet people wherever they are. In 2019 Amplifon acquired Otohub—a company pioneering mobile device solutions for common hearing problems—to drive innovation and bring more modern solutions to customers faster.

Before acquiring Otohub, Amplifon relied on external providers for application design and development; however, Amplifon recognized the acquisition as an opportunity to take back control of its code and streamline the development of new products. They launched AmplifonX, a start-up within Amplifon with a team of engineers dedicated to accelerating the development and distribution of innovative digital solutions for hearing care professionals and end users.

To accomplish this goal, Amplifon needed a centralized platform to store its code, facilitate development across a dispersed workforce, and automate its CI/CD pipeline. The decision for Amplifon to utilize GitHub Enterprise for this in-house development renaissance was easy. Otohub had been working with GitHub for years and understood that a unified platform would help the organization more quickly achieve its goal of streamlined product development. Amplifon also knew GitHub had laid out an ambitious roadmap to become the best all-in-one developer platform, making it their top choice over other options.  

“As a developer, I couldn’t live without the integrations GitHub offers,” said Luigi Ungaro, Global Engine Developer Lead. While it was easy to identify desirable features, Amplifon also knew what they wanted to avoid. “We chose GitHub Enterprise Cloud because it enabled us to simplify the systems we use to host and deploy code, which is key for us.” says Ungaro. This reduction in complexity was welcome, since Amplifon already has a large number of internal infrastructures to maintain and they were able to conveniently integrate other GitHub tools in their daily work.

With Amplifon’s entire codebase centralized on GitHub, code reuse has blossomed across the organization. Enhanced visibility enabled an innersource approach to development that has saved time and streamlined collaboration amongst globally dispersed teams. Amplifon further simplified code reuse by implementing pull request templates to provide consistency across the organization's code base and ensure that newly created repositories adhere to company standards and coding guidelines. These changes make it easier for developers to build on top of previously created components, improving velocity, and letting developers focus on innovation. Working in the healthcare industry requires an unwavering commitment to security. Secure software development involves managing access to customer health data on an individual level. Amplifon addressed this concern by using GitHub Enterprise Managed Users. Bernat Nosas Comerma, a Senior .Net Developer and GitHub Manager at Amplifon, explains, "GitHub EMUs have improved security by centralizing user provisioning.” Beyond individual user permissions, Enterprise Managed Users also enables automatic provisioning of additional security measures, such as Single Sign-On for external applications.

Dependabot provides an additional layer of security by constantly monitoring for insecure dependencies. Developers receive alerts for potential vulnerabilities, and automatic pull request recommendations simplify the remediation process. Amplifon currently leans on Dependabot for analysis of Java, .NET, as well as JavaScript packages (npm), and has broader plans for future utilization. “Dependabot will become a part of our daily code review and issue flows to check dependencies before moving code to production,” says Ungaro.

We chose GitHub Enterprise Cloud because it enabled us to simplify the systems we use to host and deploy code, which is key for us.”

With GitHub Actions, Amplifon shortened build times by approximately 30,000 minutes per month. The company achieved this by automating over 2,000 of its development workflows with more than 5,000 Action minutes per month,  increasing overall developer productivity while cutting costs, and securing their software supply chain. Using a mix of GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners for Actions allows them the flexibility to integrate their custom hardware into tests without compromising on quality compared to standalone application testing.

In most situations, Amplifon finds GitHub-hosted runners to be the right tool for the job. “We prefer to use GitHub-hosted runners because of how powerful they are,” says Bernat Nosas Comerma. However, in situations requiring highly specialized configurations, the company tends to lean on self-hosted runners. Amplifon distributes hearing aids and offers the related softwares and mobile applications; this diversity requires it to embrace automation workflows that excel in both physical and digital environments. In these situations, self-hosted runners provide Amplifon with the perfect solution for custom implementations.

Amplifon heavily utilizes GitHub Packages and has found that integration with GitHub Actions allows it to implement automation in powerful ways. Having a centralized location for building and publishing packages across various languages has been game-changing not only in the amount of time it saves but also because of its resulting consistency across languages.

With geographically dispersed development teams building with different devices and editors, ensuring a consistent experience from anywhere in the world can be challenging. Now, with GitHub Codespaces, Amplifon can spin up fully configured development environments that live in the cloud, available whenever and wherever employees choose to work. This integration accelerated developer onboarding, increased productivity, and provided the kind of personal flexibility that is impactful to developer happiness. “With Codespaces, we can code from an iPad and then build and distribute that code using GitHub Actions,” Ungaro notes. “This is life-changing for a developer and it empowers us to build a remote-working culture where delivering quality is the main focus.”

Codespaces isn’t the only life-changing product that Amplifon utilizes. Ungaro emphasizes, "Copilot’s potential is fascinating to us, it is one reason we selected GitHub.” Since first implementing Copilot, Amplifon has seen consistent growth in demand for access from its development teams. Currently, GitHub Copilot acts as an assistant in day-to-day operations, but Ungaro stresses that the potential for additional use cases is exciting. 

When Amplifon began its transition to in-house design, it chose to unify its workflows on GitHub rather than relying on piecemeal solutions for application development infrastructure. This simplified code reuse, saved time through automation, and increased developer happiness. “Between Copilot, Codespaces, Issues, Actions, and Dependabot, GitHub is at the center of our development universe,” says Ungaro. “GitHub has enabled us to increase the velocity of our development and has shortened our time-to-market.”