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Cloud Doesn’t Fix Your Dev/Test Challenges? You Need Intelligent Test Environment Management

Capgemini
November 18, 2020

Organizations are looking for ways to accelerate transformation and deliver new and improved digital services to their customers. The industry recipe for achieving the agility to make this happen is to skip the datacenter and go straight to the cloud. However, the results of this approach can be mixed.

We recently worked with a large UK insurance company that illustrates their successful approach. For the last three years, the company has been running most non-production development and testing workloads in the public cloud, but time-to-market (TTM) gains remain elusive and costs are high. Setting up and maintaining “fit-for-purpose” dev/test environments—whether on-prem or in the cloud—remains complex, time-consuming, and costly. This same story is playing out across hundreds of companies.

However, smart IT teams are discovering that a multicloud approach—combining on-prem and public cloud infrastructure with advanced automation—delivers greater agility while helping control costs.

A Smarter Approach to Testing and Other Non-Production Workloads

Capgemini, Nutanix, and Plutora have partnered to create Smart Foundry, a complete Test Environment Management (TEM) platform that solves testing challenges and accelerates development. Smart Foundry reduces the burden of test environments, achieving higher utilization rates, better observability, and cadence.

Capgemini provides the expertise to deliver TEM as a managed service tailored to your needs. Plutora’s Value Stream Management bridges the gap between business goals and software development practices, while Nutanix software-defined multicloud architecture underpins the solution.

Smart Foundry delivers immediate time, quality, and cost benefits for stakeholders across your company:

  • Reduce test-environment provisioning time and test idle-time.
  • Reduce defects using fit-for-purpose environments.

Cost. Choose between CapEx and OpEx cost models and utilize public cloud and datacenter resources more effectively.

Smart Foundry has four key attributes: multi-premises, tool agnostic, intelligently integrated, and domain centric.

Deploy Transparently Across Datacenters and Public Cloud

To successfully test new applications end-to-end, across multiple delivery channels and a multicloud landscape, you need a different approach to quality engineering. Smart Foundry uses its intelligent integration framework to auto-recover environments, letting your teams quickly and transparently spin up and manage test environments on-prem or in the cloud if a failure occurs. The platform is cloud agnostic and capable of operating across public and private cloud environments to address diverse requirements.

Nutanix Calm encapsulates the specifics of the test environment for each application in a detailed blueprint. This blueprint orchestrates the deployment of a new test environment in the selected datacenter or cloud environment, greatly simplifying and accelerating deployments and ensuring repeatability. For containerized applications, Nutanix Karbon provides a complete multicloud Kubernetes service with rapid deployment and simple management.

Use Your Existing Tools

Although the value stream management and environment provisioning modules are tightly and intelligently integrated, Smart Foundry is an API-driven solution that works with the test and development tools you already use, saving your teams from having to learn all new tooling to get started.

Plutora and Nutanix technologies serve as the core engine of the solution, with Plutora’s value stream platform providing insights into your software development lifecycle (SDLC), identifying inefficiencies, and reducing the administrative burden. Otherwise, Smart Foundry integrates into your existing tool ecosystem.

Integrate with Your Operations

Integration and data governance challenges complicate application testing, threatening delivery schedules and software quality. Smart Foundry offers intelligent integration based on Capgemini’s years of experience in enterprise environments. Test environments integrate with data management functions, chaos engineering capabilities, and auto recovery options along with continuous monitoring, observability, and development pipelines to ensure seamless and efficient operations.

Domain-Centric

Generic solutions provide generic outcomes. They can require extensive customization to meet industry-specific requirements. Smart Foundry is tailored to deliver domain-specific test environments for industries such as banking and insurance.

For example, many property and casualty (P&C) insurance companies rely on Guidewire to support key functions such as policy management, billing, and claims. Smart Foundry is built to handle domain-centric problems like the Guidewire issues illustrated below.

Smart Foundry understands how Guidewire performs in multicloud environments and is designed to facilitate Guidewire testing and problem resolution out of the box by monitoring the transaction-level availability of Guidewire processes and analyzing it to provide a single view of the world from a single entry point.

Find Out More

To find out more about Smart Foundry, check out these additional resources:

To set up a meeting or a workshop to discuss the Smart Foundry solution contact us at tem.uk@capgemini.com.

About Capgemini

Capgemini is a global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology and engineering services. The Group is at the forefront of innovation to address the entire breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of cloud and digital platforms. Building on its strong 50-year+ heritage and deep industry-specific expertise, Capgemini enables organizations to realize their business ambitions through an array of services from strategy to operations. Capgemini is driven by the conviction that the business value of technology comes from and through people. Today, it is a multicultural company of 270,000 team members in almost 50 countries. With Altran, the Group reported 2019 combined revenues of €17billion.

Learn more about us at www.capgemini.com

Co-author:

Dave Hocking

Dave Hocking – GSI Cloud Architect, Nutanix

Dave’s a techie at heart and has worked in multiple roles over his 20 year career, with a strong focus on Virtual Infrastructure, Automation and Cloud. He has worked for Nutanix for three years and passionate about technology and potential applications for solving business problems.