Cognizant

About Cognizant

Cognizant is one of the world’s leading professional services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Its unique industrybased, consultative approach helps many of the best-known organizations in every industry and geography build and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

One of Cognizant’s clients is the largest UKbased energy and services company supplying electricity and gas to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom, Ireland and North America. Cognizant were engaged in a program of migrating all its internal and customer-facing applications from an on-premises datacenter in the UK to the cloud. This aligned the company’s move towards digital transformation and a desire to increase flexibility by hosting applications in a multi-cloud environment, including Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Cognizant Cloud. The objective was to create a single performance testing process, taking the opportunity for some consolidation, to support a wide spectrum of technologies, realize cost savings, and bring improved alignment between three different geographies, spanning four divisions of the organization.

Karthik, Senior Technical Test Lead, at Cognizant, explains further: “Our client looked to us to recommend a cloud-based performance testing solution that would support current and future requirements. The geographical and divisional span of the organization meant that our solution needed to support many different industry protocols, such as SAP, Oracle, Java, and web.”

The client and Cognizant conducted a detailed assessment, involving various stakeholders, to determine the right tool kit to support the technology requirements at enterprise level in the short and medium term.

Multiple performance testing solutions were evaluated against a traceability matrix framework prepared between the client and Cognizant. Micro Focus LoadRunner Cloud was found to meet the main selection criteria to establish best-in-class cloud load testing within Cognizant’s client. LoadRunner Cloud also has the edge over other tools as an elastic cloud, self-driving test solution that can create dozens and hundreds of Load Generators (LGs) on demand within just a few minutes in over 20 cloud regions around the world, to emulate real networks during load testing when required. In a geographically diverse world such as this client’s, this is a valuable feature.

Working closely with its client and Micro Focus, Cognizant managed the LoadRunner Cloud implementation, involving 5,000 virtual users. Karthik on the complexity of the client environment: “The client uses SAP GUI protocols; modern ones such as Fiori and HANA, and legacy ones such as ECC. Initially this gave some scalability issues in the performance tests, but the client, Cognizant and Micro Focus collaborated closely to troubleshoot this and managed to scale up to 50 users per LG, which had been the target.”

Karthik can see one very clear benefit: “The flexibility and scalability the new cloud model affords our client is clear to see. It takes just one click to select the relevant regional LG and the appropriate load, accessible from any device. A massive productivity improvement for our team right there.”

It is easier to comply with SLAs as thresholds for successful test completion are visible to all, and are included in standard reporting. An intuitive dashboard provides complete, real-time network breakdown to isolate and remediate application performance bottlenecks.

The client comments: “We are pleased to see that the chosen global cloud solution is giving us improved flexibility, scalability, and maintainability benefits. Tool licenses and optimizations in LG machines also realized an annual cost savings of £60,000, as part of the LoadRunner Cloud implementation.”