Challenge
Calypso needed to be able to provision an environment, triage and resolve defects, and deliver software back to a client within three days. Existing non-virtualized environments took 2-4 hours to build, were inconsistent, and prevented global collaboration.
Results
Support release cycles occurred 70% faster, while build, release, and support cycle costs dropped by 50%. Employee productivity and satisfaction improved, and customers gained hands-on demos for closer customer engagement.
About Calypso
Calypso is a software provider to financial institutions and has more than 550 employees, 150 customers and 18,000 users across the globe. Calypso’s development, QA, and support teams are required to deliver new innovations and fixes in an agile development cycle on six different code bases. The company works with a 2GB source repository and dozens of traditional applications. Calypso also follows an internal three-day fix SLA, meaning that the company needs to provision an environment, triage and resolve defects, and deliver software back to the client within three days, a high bar for success.
Before Skytap, Calypso had not used virtualization as part of its technology infrastructure. The company knew it needed a solution that would save time and money and offer complete support workflow from within the virtual cloud environment.
Calypso’s Challenge
For Calypso, setting up IT environments would take a daunting two to four hours. This was particularly difficult with older environments, and it was a struggle to identify the correct database and configure new environments. This resulted in engineers and developers working from one environment while support teams were busy on another. Extensive back and forth was needed to obtain a reproducible test case, and Calypso was plagued by inconsistent test environments.
Collaborating on environments was nearly impossible, as Calypso’s globally spread teams had no easy way to duplicate and share their virtual machines. This resulted in widely dispersed product management, QA and engineering teams working from different time zones, significantly lengthening turnaround. A simple environment fix that should take a few minutes could take up to 24 hours to implement.
Due to the slow provisioning speeds and lack of collaboration across teams, Calypso struggled to adhere to the company’s internal three-day SLA. On top of these challenges, Calypso operates on six major code lines, making it challenging to fix, back port and deliver enhancements in a timely manner. For every identified bug, Calypso might have to fix up to three different versions: the client’s installed version, the version currently shipping in the service pack, and a fix on the company’s development head if the bug had never been discovered by test teams to-date.
Skytap Solution
Calypso turned to Skytap to create agile IT environments for its development, QA and support teams. Skytap’s scalability and ease-of-use made it an ideal solution for Tim Murphy, director of engineering at Calypso.
“Skytap has made the provisioning process very simple, which is incredibly important to us. I’ve used several other cloud services, but they only offer big toolboxes where you are responsible for building out and customizing the infrastructure to your specific needs,” said Murphy.
With Skytap’s on-demand, self-service environments, Calypso engineers can run applications without code or architectural changes, and distributed teams can continue to leverage existing tools and development practices. Skytap also provides the ability to create identical copies of development and test stacks, and collaborate on customers’ specific issues using a simple Skytap URL.
Outcomes
By moving to the cloud, Calypso was better able to serve its client base. The company significantly increased the efficiency and flexibility of its worldwide staff, while reducing spending on server hosting and infrastructure. In addition to creating agile IT environments, moving to Skytap allowed Calypso to reduce IT burden and overall operating costs, improve development and test infrastructure without new capital expenses, and benefit from the flexibility of a pay-as-you-go pricing model.
The company was able to provision virtual, shareable environments in less than 15 minutes, while also providing internal development, test, and support teams with an entire library of environments for easy recall. Support teams in Paris and developers in San Francisco were now able to share and work on the exact same environment using a simple web URL.
Calypso not only increased product turnarounds by 70%, but also decreased the time associated with build, release, and support cycles by over 50%. It was also able to generate greater employee productivity and satisfaction, as performing the support analysis of applications was no longer seen as a chore.
Skytap also enabled Calypso to share pre-releases with clients. A customer that gained access to advanced previews could fully demo a product, and come back with recommended bug fixes. This capability not only significantly lowered costs, but also allowed for deeper levels of client exposure throughout the development cycle.
“Skytap’s solution enabled us to be up and running in a matter of minutes, and in the end, has enabled us to grow significantly against our competitors.”
Tim Murphy, Director of Engineering, Calypso
