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One thing we’ve often been asked is who can justify investing in this converged, automated and extremely intelligent solution? But the reality is, no matter who the customer is, the driving factor behind the decision is usually the same.
Sharing an example
Let me give you an example. One of our customers, a large insurance company, uses a Risk Management Platform, which is an application based on a number of non IBM technologies. One of the biggest components of this platform is TIBCO Spotfire.
This application is critical for our customer – it allows them to analyse and spot trends to identify risk. Perfect for an insurance company!
It’s because of this value that other business areas within the customer’s organisation started to take more notice of this Platform…and effectively started asking if they could use it too.
Great stuff.
Not as easy as it seems
But take that demand and couple it with the ongoing development and test work required to make enhancements, and the efforts needed to simply maintain the software, and you have a sizable problem – how can I rapidly deploy the multiple dev/test/prod environments needed to support this platform in several parts of the business?
Based on the complexity of the Platform it could take our customer months to release a new dev/test environment. Then you look at managing upgrades and you have a similar problem. When the new environment is released how do you know it will be consistent with others? Could there be a small difference based on human error that will cause significant problems further down the line?
Where PureApplication helped
PureApplication can solve all of these problems and cut down the release of new environments to minutes. In fact we (Icon) proved it with our POC again and again. Oh and because PureApplication is based on bleeding edge Hardware it outperforms existing platforms too!
Creating a PureApplication pattern for this very complex topology allowed them to reduce their downtime, greatly speed up their computation times (by a factor of over 2) and introduce new DevOps style production values.
So, who makes the perfect PureApplication customer?
Simple…… large, complex organisations who need to run large, complex applications and workloads in a ‘just in time’ manner.
What I mean by this is, similar to certain manufacturing techniques, it is sometimes the case that a product is needed very quickly at short notice. It is required now without delay and without mistakes to help support the application development team and in turn the business. Delays or mistakes are not ideal but they happen… unfortunately too regularly.
That’s what we enjoy here – finding those customers and showing them how we can bring just in time manufacturing techniques to their IT Operations using something called PureApplication….
