CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT EBOOK SERIES: Chapter 1. Why Continuous Deployment Is Critical to Your Digital Transformation Strategy

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1 CONTINUOUS DEPLOYMENT EBOOK SERIES: Chapter 1 Why Continuous Deployment Is Critical to Your Digital Transformation Strategy

2 In the Application Economy, the User Is King In today s application economy, users are king and it was the collision of numerous trends that paved the way for their rise to power. To name a few, the ubiquity of the Internet, the consumerization of IT and the explosion of mobile devices and social media have increased users expectations for innovative, easy-to-use and flexible services. At the same time, their tolerance for poor performance has reached an all-time low. Fail to meet their requirements, and they won t hesitate to find another provider who will. 50 million 95 % mobile apps are downloaded every day. are abandoned within a month. 1 As a result of this revolution, creating an exceptional user experience and maintaining it across all channels and devices have become baseline necessities for success in today s ultra-competitive market. But, delivering on that promise has become a multi-faceted challenge spanning a variety of communication channels. 2 1 Nuance, Why 95% of Mobile Apps are Abandoned and Tips to Keep Your Apps from Becoming Part of that Statistic.

3 Digital Transformation as a Solution to the User-Expectations Challenge According to Google, 90% of people use multiple screens sequentially (e.g., computers, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) to browse the Internet, shop online, manage finances, plan trips and accomplish a number of other daily goals. 2 In order to ensure that users have an exceptional experience across these various devices, many organizations are adopting digital transformation strategies. What is digital transformation? It s a strategy whose goal is to provide a branded, consistent, integrated and holistic experience to users, regardless of how they engage with you. For example with retail organizations, it means merging the in-store and online shopping experience, enabling customers to do things like buy products online, but pick up or return them in any store. Yet while digital transformation strategies have the potential to help satisfy growing user expectations, they also create new challenges and added pressure for IT organizations that are tasked with enabling this cross-channel functionality. These challenges begin with designing a flexible application, and extend deep into the IT infrastructure, where legacy hardware and systems of record must perform flawlessly within a modern, composite application stream. What Does Digital Transformation Mean Across Industries? Banks provide mobile applications that give customers unprecedented visibility into, and control over, their assets. Healthcare systems create online portals where patients can view test results and historical information. Auto manufacturers put operating systems and Wi-Fi hotspots in their newest vehicles. The list goes on and on 2 Google, The New Multi-Screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior,

4 New Opportunities for the Business, Added Pressures for IT From a business perspective, you really have no choice but to pursue a digital transformation strategy. The end-user king has spoken, and only a seamless user experience across different devices and channels will satisfy his demands. Plus, there s the added benefits of better customer adoption and retention and, ultimately, increased revenue for the business. From an IT perspective, however, digital transformation creates new obstacles and headaches, including: Accelerated timelines The typical turnaround of 12+ weeks for an enterprise-scale application won t cut it in today s fast-moving marketplace, so IT must find ways to speed applications from concept through delivery. Consistent performance IT teams have to make sure an application will perform at a high level regardless of the device or operating environment, which adds complexities to code and test activities. API integration No applications exist in a vacuum; they must be flexible enough to integrate with thirdparty systems and that means accounting for additional APIs and dependencies. Customer feedback Users expect their applications to evolve, so IT teams must have an efficient way to not only gather customer feedback, but also quickly release updates into production. Legacy support Since most enterprise IT environments comprise a mix of legacy and modern equipment, teams have to find ways to utilize legacy systems to support user experiences that weren t even imagined when the hardware was created. 4

5 Moving the Needle With Continuous Deployment In order to overcome digital transformation challenges and truly capitalize on the opportunities it presents, organizations like yours have to think bigger than small-scale augmentations or throwing more resources at the problem. Such solutions might work in isolated cases, but they ll never move the needle enough or drive competitive differentiation. What s needed is a more transformative approach. One that enables continuous development and delivery of applications and helps you focus on innovation, speed and quality characteristics that will help you stand out in a crowded market. To this end, many thought leaders have made Continuous Deployment a key component of their digital transformation strategies. Continuous Deployment can be defined as a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time and risk of delivering incremental changes to users. It does this by automating the delivery process and reducing the complexity of moving new applications through the promotion path and into production. As a result, you can accelerate development timelines, increase the quality of applications and reduce dev/test costs all in service of achieving your digital transformation goals. With Continuous Deployment, you can transform and accelerate the software delivery pipeline, so complex releases occur in hours or minutes, not weeks or days. 5

6 Continuous Deployment in Action Innovation Accelerate movement from innovation to business value Business value $ Automate application deployment and promotion Dev Test Prod Plan and orchestrate the entire release process Develop Build/CI Provision Configure Deploy Test Environments Automatically provision, configure and deploy the appropriate application, data and environment resources as needed 6

7 About the Solution From CA Technologies The Continuous Deployment solution from CA Technologies provides innovative technology for optimizing application development and testing and increasing the velocity of enterprise application delivery, while simultaneously driving quality and reducing the cost of innovation. The cornernstone of our Continuous Deployment solution is CA Release Automation, which automates the complex changes required for code movement, deployment and provisioning tasks between development, test and production environments. This means you can: Accelerate time-to-market on new applications Increase application quality by reducing errors, costs and bottlenecks Leverage and maximize your existing application delivery investments Ultimately capitalize on your digital transformation opportunities Customers that use CA Release Automation have experienced the following benefits 3 : Up to 15x reduction in manual effort required for application release, improving IT productivity while lowering costs 100 supported integrations, enabling automation steps to be repurposed in other applications and environments to reduce costs 3 All statistics on this page are based on actual customers that have renewed with CA as of a 2014 review of the CA customer database.. 7

8 What s Next? In chapter 2 of our ebook series, we ll take an in-depth look at the common IT challenge of tool sprawl and how Continuous Deployment can help you consolidate and integrate your tools for maximum efficiency and impact. For more information, visit ca.com/releaseautomation. CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact, and communicate across mobile, private, and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at ca.com. Copyright 2015 CA. All rights reserved. All other trademarks, trade names, services marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. The customer experiences described in this document are illustrative and not intended to be predictive of any future performance by CA products and does not create any express or implied warranties of any kind. This document is for your informational purposes only