Previously posted on the Siebel Hub at http://www.siebelhub.com/main/2015/02/using-bloomspire-environment-service-customer-success-story.html
Following on from the series of posts provided by Bloomspire to the Siebel Hub, they kindly have agreed to post a recent customer success story. We hope that this story will give our readers a good real-life example of the kind of services they provide to the Siebel Ecosystem. Over once again to Jon Higgs.
The Customer Scenario
Recently, Bloomspire was engaged to help a customer upgrade from 7.8 to 8.1. We leveraged our Environment Service to reduce the overall duration of the upgrade and in doing so, provided the customer with other benefits that helped them to reduce risk to their upgrade project. How exactly? Allow us to explain.
Upgrade Environment Up and Running – Fast
As many of you already know, embarking on a journey to upgrade Siebel can be daunting and one of the key questions to answer before getting started is… where will all of the development work for the upgrade take place?
This question gets more complicated if parallel development is necessary, or if customers simply don’t have the computer resources available to stand up additional environments. There is another important consideration – the time it takes the Operations team to setup a new environment. For some, this alone can take weeks due to team member availability and red tape.
The customer I’m referring to was in fact dealing with many of these issues. However, they wanted to get their upgrade started quickly in order to meet their target go-live. To do so, we used the Bloomspire Environment Service to spin up a new upgrade environment with their configuration. How long did this take? It took several days to start one of our pre-built environment templates and apply their configuration. Not only did this save their project time because it allowed them to get started right away but it also allowed them to properly plan, order and build the environments that they needed in house to support the upgraded system going forward (without having to rush). Once their environments were ready, we simply transferred the upgraded configuration in the Bloomspire Environment Service to their hardware.
Easily Recover from Upgrade Errors
Ever wish there was an “Undo” button for your environment just like there is on Word or Excel? We have.
Thankfully, we’ve solved that problem in our Environment Service and had to use it several times during the course of this customer’s upgrade project. For example, while running the upgrade scripts, a critical error was reported and as a result the process failed. Instead of spending hours undoing what had been done and starting over, we simply restored the environment from our last snapshot. Since the Environment Service takes daily snapshots of our environments, it wasn’t a problem to fall back and try again.
This didn’t happen frequently but when it did it saved the team a lot time and frustration. Plus, it turned out to be an effective risk mitigation strategy. It gave the customer confidence to know that no matter what the issue, we could recover quickly because the project was working over a “safety net” in case something bad happened unexpectedly.
Environments Quickly Replicated for Testing
The Environment Service allows us to quickly and easily refresh the Test environment on a frequent basis to deploy new updates and bug fixes. By this I mean that instead of spending time and dedicating team resources to execute complex deployments to a Test environment, we simply destroyed it and re-created it from a copy of Development.
Frequently. The entire process takes 1 person about 45 minutes during which time we take a snapshot of both the existing Dev and Test environments, the Test environment is destroyed and re-created from the copy of Dev and both environments are restarted.
Easily. Because it is so easy, the project team can enjoy the benefit of refreshing the Test environment on more frequent intervals. This means, for example, that a bug can be identified in Test, fixed in Dev, deployed to Test and re-tested within the same day without a lot of effort or interruption. What if we introduce a critical defect? Not a problem, we just restore Test from our latest snapshot. This by the way, only takes about 10 or 15 minutes.
New Environments When Needed
The customer needed a stable environment for an End-user demonstration, but they did not want to disrupt the work that was taking place in the Development or Test environments. To accomplish this, we simply created a new environment. In a matter of minutes a group of users had their own environment to do with as they pleased. This can be done at any time, using an environment snapshot from any point in time, as many times as necessary.
Summary
We hope that we’ve been able to accurately convey some of the many features of using the Bloomspire Environment Service and how it benefited our customer. If you have questions or comments, we would love the opportunity to discuss them further. Please visit our website (www.bloomspire.com), send us a message using the comments form below or feel free to contact us directly. Best of luck in your future journeys with Siebel.
We look forward to sharing more on the new Siebel Hub and want to thank Richard, Bruce and Alex for the opportunity to post here.