Customer Objectives
What started as a revolutionary concept of requesting a ride via your phone evolved into the largest mobility platform in the world with an estimated 93 million monthly active users. Yet while constantly innovating, evolving and solving large-scale challenges, process inefficiencies were significantly impacting their software delivery lifecycle. All the challenges that come with manual deployments into test and production environments were taxing the IT group responsible for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). The organization sought a software solution that could provide control, visibility, speed—and relief—to the team, and grow along with them. FlexDeploy answered all those demands.
Challenge
Manual processes to manage the software delivery lifecycle created limited control, poor visibility as to what was deployed into each environment, error-prone delivery, and ultimately an inability to deliver quality software quickly.
A regular weekly deployment required manual bundling, testing, approvals, and deployments. A developer would manually build and test files and attach that package to a Jira ticket, which would then have to be downloaded and installed by a DBA before they could test and migrate to a subsequent environment. Approvals required the approver to look at previous conversations to ensure a package had been deployed properly. These small, manual tasks added up to a time-consuming, error-prone process, with significant time spent waiting and wasted manhours.
Any controls that were in place were manual, which meant there were many touch points where something could go wrong. This resulted in slowing the semi-annual Sarbanes–Oxley audits, as they required the team to dig through old reports, conversations and manually tracked notes to answer auditor queries.
It was evident that inefficient, manual processes were not sustainable and were getting more intrusive as the company grew. While the explosive growth was welcome, the IT team couldn’t afford to continue with their manual processes and let their issues turn into an even bigger impediment to delivery. The lack of consistency, controls and visibility required their attention.
Solution
The organization spoke to colleagues and undertook an extensive evaluation process for CI/CD tooling. They did an analysis of Quest Stat, Micro Focus PPM, Bamboo, Circle CI, and FlexDeploy. FlexDeploy came out the clear winner.
FlexDeploy provided out-of-the-box support for large commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) systems such as EBS, and could easily evolve with the team. Integration with, and coordination of, other tools across the lifecycle, such as Jira, was seamless. The organization’s criteria also included a tool that could support approvals and security. They found that FlexDeploy offered significant security, with control at all levels of the delivery lifecycle. Flexibility was also a big deciding factor as they could customize FlexDeploy to map to their processes.
Results
FlexDeploy has been successfully supporting and delivering on the goals of this innovative global organization. The team has seen significant benefits across five main areas:
- Time and cost savings: A “fully manual nightmare” is now completely automated. A developer can make their changes, check in code, automatically kick off a build, and go for approvals. Once approved those changes are automatically moved into a subsequent environment. No more manually packaging, building, downloading, promoting or asking for approval.
- Reduction in deployment failures: Because FlexDeploy’s EBS plugin knows how to handle EBS customizations in an automated and repeatable way, the team is no longer dealing with deployment failures.
- Controls and visibility: FlexDeploy has provided extensive controls, governance and visibility. Security is critical for this company and role-based access enables segregation of duties, which ensures users have appropriate access through the build through release lifecycle. Configurable approvals and notifications mean the right people have sign-off and oversight according to the team’s needs. Additionally, users have visibility and traceability from when an artifact is checked out of source control until it’s deployed into production.
- Audit response: Auditors are given their own logins to FlexDeploy with read-only permissions so they can run their own reports. They can use FlexDeploy to look at a specific deployment, see the corresponding Jira ticket, and have traceability to how that Jira ticket tracked a package or artifact into production.
- Reallocation of work: Time savings from members across the team has been transitioned to other work and other projects. This allows faster time to deliver new features, innovate and reimagine existing features and offerings.
With FlexDeploy, this company found a CI/CD solution that met their current requirements and a platform for the future—ensuring control, visibility, and efficiency. They’re confident in a long-term partnership with Flexagon.
