Allianz improves time to market at a lower cost with Micro Focus.
“Serena (now part of Micro Focus) Deployment Automation has provided us with all the benefits that we expected it would, our original business case has been realized, and we now expect to gain further value as we roll it out to the rest of the organization.”
CHRIS RISEBROW
Allianz Project Delivery Manager
Allianz
Financial Services
United Kingdom
Allianz Insurance is one of the largest general insurers in the UK and part of the Allianz SE Group, one of the leading integrated financial services providers worldwide and the largest property and casualty insurer in the world. With approximately 142,000 employees worldwide, the Allianz Group serves approximately 78 million customers in more than 70 countries.
Allianz Managed Operations & Services SE (AMOS) is the internal shared-services provider to the Allianz Group. It provides Allianz with in-house services in the fields of IT, operations, and services—integrated, global, and from a single source, by experts for experts. AMOS charges the business for services delivered on a per man-day basis. AMOS currently supports over 60 applications on a variety of platforms.
The main challenges that Allianz faced were the costs and time to market of its main retail application. The AMOS team was deploying three releases a day for this application, which required both Oracle database and WebSphere deployments. This was a resource-heavy, very time-consuming, and manual process. Highly paid and highly skilled Oracle DBAs and Web-Sphere programmers were spending up to 50% of their time doing release deployments into pre-production environments. This was a huge cost for them and a big charge back to Allianz. The demand for more releases kept growing, and with staff restrictions, the team felt that it was reaching a stage where the continued demand and frequency of releases would not be manageable under the current process. With pressure from the business to cut costs and increase demand, the business case was in place to support the need to solve this problem.
The objective was to implement a “single click” deployment solution obviating use of the highly paid technical resources normally engaged in Oracle and WebSphere deployments. Allianz was in a hurry to get a fix, and Micro Focus Software quickly implemented a POC based on Allianz’s requirements, which demonstrated the potential for a reduction in resources of up to two people per release. The Micro Focus team accurately scoped out the POC and provided timely support. Allianz was already familiar with Micro Focus’s world-class support and reputation as an enterprise vendor, and as a result, Allianz selected Micro Focus Software to address these challenges.
Since implementing Deployment Automation, the AMOS team has turned over the deployment tasks to the project team, where release managers and not Oracle DBAs actually perform all release deployments. The Oracle DBAs and WebSphere programmers are now free to focus full-time on creating value to the business. The process is a single, button-push deployment, and AMOS has seen significant time-to-market improvements at a significantly lower cost to the business.
Moving forward, the AMOS team will be upgrading to the latest version of Deployment Automation and will begin to roll it out to other applications. “Serena (now part of Micro Focus) Deployment Automation has provided us with all the benefits that we expected it would, our original business case has been realized, and we now expect to gain further value as we roll it out to the rest of the organization,” says Chris Risebrow, Allianz Project Delivery Manager.