Summary
In its drive to optimize customization and speed of information provision, CZ wanted to reduce the time to market of its services while at the same time becoming more agile and innovative. The path chosen to achieve these objectives was a transition to the Azure cloud. In the end, this led to a more innovative and agile organization with a shorter time to market, cost optimization, and better services.
An Xpirit, part of Xebia Group, customer story.
Because of their hands-on mentality and focus on sharing knowledge, the consultants enabled us to reach the level where we could do the actual work ourselves.
Technical Details
Azure FinanceBinx Team
The challenge
In its drive to optimize customization and speed of information provision, the company wanted to reduce the time to market of its services while at the same becoming more agile and innovative. The path chosen to achieve these objectives was a transition to the Cloud.
Aren de Hooge, Manager Information and Project Management at CZ explains: “While the need to innovate was clear, the way to realize this required maximum care. Moving to the Cloud may sound simple, but for us it involved making the strategic translation to our digital strategy. This ranged from identifying application workloads that needed to be moved to the cloud to a transition from TFS to VSTS, as well as the implementation of DevOps to ensure a solid Cloud-first foundation. Naturally, our own team of IT professionals had a wealth of ideas, but in order to make a well-founded decision, we involved Xpirit because of its dedicated knowhow and relevant experience in staking out the path to the Cloud.”
The Solution
A transition like this involves three components: technology, process, and people. And out of those three, technology is the easy part. You sometimes get the feeling that only 5% of the effort and attention goes to technology, while 95% is required for influencing people, creating the right community, and bringing about cultural change. And this was certainly needed because the culture of a Cloud-first agile approach in DevOps teams is diametrically opposed to the culture of risk minimization.
The results
We guided CZ when it came to developing the teams and the community required for implementing the changes. Our consultants were hands-on on the work floor and integrated as a team member. We became one of the team and shared our knowledge. This empowered CZ to reach the level where they could do the actual work ourselves.
The transition to the Azure cloud led to a more innovative and agile organization with a shorter time to market, cost optimization, and better services. The development cycles are shorter and teams are able to maintain their products themselves.
About the customer
CZ is a healthcare insurance company without an aim for profit. Following 90 years of successful business, the company has a strong track record of providing high-quality services focused on convenience and customer care.