Delphix pays off - City Index increase IT app output by 20%

Systems Integrator Verianco began discussions with City Index on how Delphix could solve a problem that was preventing their development process from realizing true agility. The City Index technology team had invested in agile practices such as continuous integration, automated testing, and fast spin up and tear down, however the sheer volume of data within the organisation was causing bottlenecks. Application development and testing worked on up to eight projects at any one time, but restoring production database copies for a single project was taking up to four hours. Multiply that out into eight projects with regular refreshes and resets and it was clear that data had become a huge problem.

"Where up-to-date data was required, development cycles were very long and demanded careful coordination between teams, not great when trying to design out dependencies", explained Toby Young, CTO of City Index. "We found ourselves having to sacrifice new innovative projects in order to prevent delivery rates from slipping."

City Index turned to Delphix for a solution. The Delphix Virtual Data Platform for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 virtualizes data in enterprise applications, governs and stores data across the application lifecycle, and delivers data on demand.

The project commenced with a three-month proof of concept (POC), which demonstrated immediate results. City Index then deployed Delphix for the entire IT team and full implementation was completed in only one month.

City Index is now cashing in on their investment. The time taken to create database copies has been reduced from four hours to just three minutes, and over thirty developers now access data via self-service, without any involvement from database or storage administrators. Project times have also been dramatically reduced. In one example a complex archiving process was rolled out in six weeks, which would have previously taken six months.

Not only did Delphix deliver in development cycles, it enabled City Index to reduce some of their infrastructure and simplify the underlying processes.

"With the speed at which data can be provisioned with Delphix and the virtual environments that we are now able to support, we could remove the shared QA environment", Young explained. "We turned to Agile to increase ITs value to the business and make it more effective. Delphix has unlocked that potential helping us increase our output to the business by 20%. The result is we can now spend much more time on innovation, which in turn drives business growth."

"Virtual data deployment is a sure bet as part of any Agile environment", said Iain Chidgey, EMEA General Manager at Delphix. "We are delighted that City Index has joined the growing number of companies using Delphix to accelerate application delivery, increase innovation and drive growth."