Micro Focus Product Services Delivery Center (PSDC) works closely with all Micro Focus product groups and customer support. Acting as an internal service provider, PSDC aims to accelerate and streamline R&D efforts. It also has the opportunity to be a change agent within the organization, identifying services to be deployed at scale and introducing new delivery models.
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PSDC delivers its services to the wider Micro Focus R&D community so that they can focus on their core competency of developing superior software for customers. With 50 Micro Focus data centers around the world, inefficiencies and a silo’d approach had started to creep in, according to Rajan Ranmal, ITOM Sales Enablement, at Micro Focus: “We could see each team managing their own resource environment for use by their own lab. They needed to be able to count on a certain block of resources and this seemed the most efficient way to ensure this. 13 groups were using different methods to provision resources; from home-grown tools or scripts, to third party solutions, resulting in inefficient use of people, processes, and technology. This lack of consistency also made it impossible to forecast resource requirement levels and associated budgets.”
PSDC wanted to provide infrastructure-on-demand to support software testing and certification across all Micro Focus product groups. By introducing transparency and control, the organization aims to break the silos and drive economies of scale with resource sharing between product teams.
Yaniv Amrami, Service Engineering and Automation Sr. Manager, at Micro Focus needed to be absolutely sure that PSDC’s requirements would be met: “Although we seemingly had a good solution in Micro Focus Hybrid Cloud Management (HCM), we looked at it very critically and compared it to alternatives. We needed the flexibility to extend across hybrid environments and provision on-demand environments for a number of services we offer. We wanted to replace all manual, home-grown, and competitive solutions with a unified solution that would provide standardization across the organization and provision resources on-demand in an intuitive manner while also providing reasonable limits on what can be requested or deployed. We liken using HCM to putting guard rails on a highway. People can still go where they like, but the rails will keep them safe while they do so.”
With HCM on-demand deployment, the organization has improved control over its environments while saving each team the time they would have spent building and managing systems. These teams can now concentrate on customer-focused activities which has provided a noticeable boost to R&D productivity. Ranmal: “We all want to focus on developing great products and delivering them to our customers, and HCM helps us do just that. HCM saves time and effort for our R&D engineers. At the same time, we deploy the solution in a real-life production environment, and give valuable feedback on the installation procedures and upgrade processes, which will ultimately benefit our HCM customers.”
Leveraging HCM, PSDC now delivers on-demand engineering and delivery services that power the product lifecycle. Environment-ondemand provides pre-configured infrastructure services that accelerate developer’s time to productivity. Product-on-demand can be used by development engineers, or customer support to reproduce problems. Database-on-demand can provision DBMS environments ensuring license compliance and proper configuration to accelerate product development. Testing and configuration services allow engineers to test their products across different operating environments. This model is shared across the organization for maximum economies of scale and optimum resource utilization. Product-translation-ondemand manages product translation for use in non-English markets.
Using HCM helps introduce technology standards across Micro Focus, leading to better governance and improved visibility across the entire organization.
Users have been overwhelmed by the positive impact that HCM has had following the introduction of HCM as the automation and control mechanism to provide infrastructure services and resources to the Micro Focus R&D community, as Amrami says: “Across the 13 groups we work with there were many opportunities where people, processes, and technology can be shared. As a result of introducing HCM we have now decommissioned 1,500 Virtual Machines (VMs) with a plan to decommission a further 700. We have freed up 64 blade servers to be repurposed, and have realized a cost saving of nearly $250,000, while avoiding spending over $700,000 in future costs.”
With a single platform for all groups to request services, there is now full visibility into the use of resources. The cost benefit comes from maximizing compute and storage resource utilization, as well as streamlining software licensing across the organization. Economies of scale and standardization have led to an improvement in the support ratio, from 1:2,000 to 1:3,000, i.e. one administration resource can now manage 3,000 VMs. R&D engineers can spend their time developing great products, instead of worrying about hardware and infrastructure necessary to complete their test and certification cycles.
Ranmal concludes: “We received feedback from two of the groups who leverage PSDC services. Their engineers are saving on average 50 hours per month using the HCMdriven infrastructure-on-demand. Time to productivity has improved from days to hours, and even just minutes in some cases, allowing R&D to dedicate more time toward development and in turn benefiting our customers around the world.
