Client Overview

A large international financial services and insurance company with approximately $34 billion of assets under management providing an extensive range of financial products to millions of individual customers.

Business Challenge

This insurance company, governed by regulatory agencies which include the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the United Kingdom, had developed Notes applications to run a number of critical business functions. Failure of these applications to perform properly would expose the company to the risk of fines, public censure by the FSA and the associated bad publicity. The company had been using a manual process to deploy changes to these applications which, while sound in its design, exhibited the following shortcomings:

  • Deployment was very slow, taking three days and sometimes more.
  • Mistakes were made during deployment, usually due to communication problems or because the process was manual, resulting in application issues in production.
  • As the manual deployment process was difficult and time consuming, new features were bundled together in large groups in each build thereby increasing the complexity of any post release problem resolution, and reducing responsiveness to business demands.

Having rejected the option of developing an in-house solution on the grounds of time and cost, the client sought an off-the-shelf alternative.

The Teamstudio Solution

Teamstudio met with the client to firstly gain a clear understanding of their environment and requirements, and secondly install and configure Teamstudio Build Manager.

As a result, application builds are now much quicker and of a higher quality, and Build Manager was configured to allow developers to perform application promotions while allowing administrators to control what steps were being performed during those promotions. To ensure accountability, Build Manager maintains a detailed record of what builds have been performed and what activity took place in those builds.

Developers and administrators now spend less time on application builds, though builds occur more frequently. The streamlined development-test-production cycle now allows developers to deliver enhanced functionality more frequently, hugely improving the responsiveness of IT to business demands. Build Manager also provides a detailed log of all deployments, giving this heavily regulated company a complete audit trail of all activity for regulatory agency audits.