Just got a really great note from one of our lead consultants in the field at a top US Telco provider. One of their major business groups that handles premium mobile content such as search, games and entertainment, needed to go live with a new customer-facing system.
The highlights? Deployment had zero defects at launch and resulted in more than $3 million in software cost savings for 2011, while saving 4-5 weeks of expected cycle time.
The company had a driving reason to virtualize services, as they had a multi-million dollar upgrade planned for their delivery platform, and with it, a wash of additional licensing and maintenance expenditures. Many of these costs would be "non value add" services and labor - duplicate licenses, time spent replicating over application servers and customer databases, all to provide an environment for them to use in pre-production to develop and test each new app against.
To top it off, the timeframe was extremely limited - the need for the above implementation was identified in March and the system was due in June this year! The app dev team chose to head off this requirement by implementing Service Virtualization models using LISA. If they failed, they would have been up the proverbial creek without an environment.
Fortunately, they were able to install and implement all of the needed virtual services and launch the new environment in less than 4 months - quite a difference from a process they had never before completed in less than a year. Then, the presence of completed, 24/7 available virtual labs allowed the development team to "shift quality left" and start collaborating immediately and shave 4-5 weeks off their expected customer services release timeline.
Anyway, we love hearing about teams that put Service Virtualization on the line to realize efficiencies and improved quality like this. Kudos!
