2. In today’s application economy, users are king—and it was the collision of numerous
trends that paved the way for their rise to power.
To name a few, the ubiquity of the Internet, the consumerization of IT and the
explosion of mobile devices and social media have increased users’ expectations for
innovative, easy-to-use and flexible services. At the same time, their tolerance for
poor performance has reached an all-time low. Fail to meet their requirements,
and they won’t hesitate to find another provider who will.
In the Application Economy,
the User Is King
2
As a result of this revolution, creating an exceptional user experience and
maintaining it across all channels and devices have become baseline necessities for
success in today’s ultra-competitive market. But, delivering on that promise has
become a multi-faceted challenge spanning a variety of communication channels.
1
Nuance, “Why 95% of Mobile Apps are Abandoned—and Tips
to Keep Your Apps from Becoming Part of that Statistic.”
millionmobile apps
are downloaded
every day.50 95%are abandoned
within a month.1
3. 3
According to Google, 90% of people use multiple screens sequentially
(e.g., computers, tablets, mobile phones, etc.) to browse the Internet, shop online, manage
finances, plan trips and accomplish a number of other daily goals.2
In order to ensure that
users have an exceptional experience across these various devices, many organizations are
adopting digital transformation strategies.
What is digital transformation? It’s a strategy whose goal is to provide a branded,
consistent, integrated and holistic experience to users, regardless of how they engage
with you. For example with retail organizations, it means merging the in-store and online
shopping experience, enabling customers to do things like buy products online, but pick up
or return them in any store.
Yet while digital transformation strategies have the potential to help satisfy growing user
expectations, they also create new challenges and added pressure for IT organizations
that are tasked with enabling this cross-channel functionality. These challenges begin with
designing a flexible application, and extend deep into the IT infrastructure, where legacy
hardware and systems of record must perform flawlessly within a modern, composite
application stream.
Digital Transformation as a Solution to
the User-Expectations Challenge
What Does Digital Transformation
Mean Across Industries?
Banks provide mobile
applications that give customers
unprecedented visibility into,
and control over, their assets.
Healthcare systems create
online portals where patients
can view test results and
historical information.
Auto manufacturers put
operating systems and
Wi-Fi hotspots in their
newest vehicles.
The list goes on and on …
2
Google, “The New Multi-Screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior,” 2012.
4. 4
From a business perspective, you really have no choice but to pursue a digital transformation strategy. The end-user king has spoken, and only a
seamless user experience across different devices and channels will satisfy his demands. Plus, there’s the added benefits of better customer adoption
and retention—and, ultimately, increased revenue for the business.
New Opportunities for the Business,
Added Pressures for IT
Accelerated
timelines
The typical turnaround
of 12+ weeks for an
enterprise-scale
application won’t cut it
in today’s fast-moving
marketplace, so IT must
find ways to speed
applications from
concept through
delivery.
Consistent
performance
IT teams have to make
sure an application will
perform at a high level
regardless of the
device or operating
environment, which
adds complexities to
code and test activities.
API integration
No applications exist in
a vacuum; they must be
flexible enough to
integrate with third-
party systems—and that
means accounting for
additional APIs and
dependencies.
Customer feedback
Users expect their
applications to evolve,
so IT teams must have
an efficient way to not
only gather customer
feedback, but also
quickly release updates
into production.
Legacy support
Since most enterprise IT
environments comprise
a mix of legacy and
modern equipment,
teams have to find ways
to utilize legacy systems
to support user
experiences that weren’t
even imagined when the
hardware was created.
From an IT perspective, however, digital transformation creates new obstacles and headaches, including:
5. 5
In order to overcome digital transformation challenges and truly capitalize on
the opportunities it presents, organizations like yours have to think bigger than
small-scale augmentations or throwing more resources at the problem. Such
“solutions” might work in isolated cases, but they’ll never move the needle
enough or drive competitive differentiation.
What’s needed is a more transformative approach. One that enables
continuous development and delivery of applications and helps you focus on
innovation, speed and quality—characteristics that will help you stand out in a
crowded market. To this end, many thought leaders have made Continuous
Deployment a key component of their digital transformation strategies.
Continuous Deployment can be defined as a set of principles and practices
to reduce the cost, time and risk of delivering incremental changes to users.
It does this by automating the delivery process and reducing the complexity
of moving new applications through the promotion path and into production.
As a result, you can accelerate development timelines, increase the quality
of applications and reduce dev/test costs—all in service of achieving your
digital transformation goals.
Moving the
Needle With
Continuous
Deployment
With Continuous Deployment, you can
transform and accelerate the software
delivery pipeline, so complex releases occur
in hours or minutes, not weeks or days.
6. 6
Continuous Deployment in Action
$
Develop Build/CI Provision Configure Deploy Test
Environments
Dev Test ProdAutomate application deployment and promotion
Innovation Business value
Accelerate movement from innovation
to business value
Plan and
orchestrate
the entire
release
process
Automatically provision, configure and deploy the appropriate
application, data and environment resources as needed
7. The Continuous Deployment solution from CA Technologies provides
innovative technology for optimizing application development and
testing and increasing the velocity of enterprise application delivery,
while simultaneously driving quality and reducing the cost of innovation.
The cornernstone of our Continuous Deployment solution is CA Release
Automation, which automates the complex changes required for code
movement, deployment and provisioning tasks between development,
test and production environments. This means you can:
• Accelerate time-to-market on new applications
• Increase application quality by reducing errors, costs and bottlenecks
• Leverage and maximize your existing application delivery
investments
• Ultimately capitalize on your digital transformation opportunities
Customers that use CA Release Automation have experienced the
following benefits3
:
• Up to 15x reduction in manual effort required for application release,
improving IT productivity while lowering costs
• 100 supported integrations, enabling automation steps to be
repurposed in other applications and environments to reduce costs
About the Solution
From CA Technologies
3
All statistics on this page are based on actual customers that have
renewed with CA as of a 2014 review of the CA customer database.. 7