Client Success | Financial Services Firm

Fortune 2000 Financial Services Firm Cuts Testing Cycle by 70% with Surgient Virtual Automation

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Executive Summary

Challenge

Aggressive release schedules of complex applications, manual testing processes and underutilized, distributed resources prove costly and time-consuming.

Solution

The Surgient Virtual Automation Platform QA/Test Solution combined with HP Quality Center improves FinanceCorp’s QA/Test cycle efficiency by 66%.

Benefits

• Increased Overall Business Productivity
  Surgient’s unique Policy-Driven Self-Service ™ approach enabled users to reserve resources in advance and provision them on-demand, with minimal IT assistance required.
• Scaled Across the Enterprise
  A single implementation of Surgient scales to meet the need to support over 5,000 financial advisors and more than 40 applications.
• Automated Repeatable Tasks
  Surgient automated the scheduling, setup and teardown of test environments, eliminating manual, administrative tasks and allowing more time to focus on strategic projects.
• Achieved Faster-Time-to-Market
  The HP Quality Center and Surgient solution accelerated product test cycles without sacrificing quality.

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Case Study

Specialized Applications for Independent Financial Advisors

FinanceCorp*, a Fortune 2000 financial services firm that provides a spectrum of specialized applications for independent financial advisors globally, has been using Surgient for years to overcome significant challenges related to its internal software development process:

• Scaling to meet the needs of 5,000+ financial advisors with varying configurations while managing the growing complexity of 40+ applications
• Supporting test lab configuration with 400+ changes per month under aggressive production schedules
• Leveraging existing test management tools, such as HP Quality Center
• Utilizing production resources at an increased capacity across a distributed environment

By using Surgient, FinanceCorp realizes a 70% time reduction in the testing process and significantly reduces data center expenses.

Challenge: Long Release Cycles and Distributed Resources

FinanceCorp delivers over 40 applications necessitating hundreds of configurations to test for each release. By adding monthly changes, as well as new applications and users, the release cycle had become an overly time intensive process. A normal timeline for a FinanceCorp application release consisted of:

• putting in a request to IT Ops at the beginning of a year
• six months of resource planning to locate necessary infrastructure for required QA/testing
• a month for QA/Test, of which 50% was setting up, configuring, and tearing down machines
• a release nine months after the initial request

Although FinanceCorp was already utilizing HP Quality Center to help automate the testing process, all the setup, configuration, and teardown of the test environments were still manual.

In addition to long release cycles, FinanceCorp found themselves in a situation with globally dispersed computing resources, leading to significant VM and server sprawl. FinanceCorp was in need of an automated solution and turned to Surgient for assistance.

Solution: Surgient Reduces Product Release Lifecycle by Six Months

FinanceCorp evaluated several technologies and determined the ideal solution included a combination of HP Quality Center and the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform with QA/Test Solution. FinanceCorp’s IT Operations team consolidate, pool and centrally manage test infrastructure used across the enterprise to minimize server sprawl and ensure maximum infrastructure utilization.

Utilizing Surgient’s partnership with HP, FinanceCorp is able to deliver a fully integrated solution for a true end-to-end testing experience. QA/Test professionals request resources, either scheduled or on-demand. At the time of their reservation, they securely access test configurations which are automatically provisioned, from a self-service portal without interfering with IT Ops. The QA/Test team is then able to test their applications against the various hundreds of configurations, leading to a higher quality and faster release cycle.

Testers are able to use their test management tool to choose a test against a configuration, and automate the setup and configuration, test the application, and teardown the environment.

With the Surgient Virtual Automation Platform™ and its unique Policy-Driven Self-Service™ model, FinanceCorp is able to reduce their product release lifecycle by six months, cutting their QA/Test cycles in half.

*Real name withheld to maintain competitive advantage.

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