CIO JOURNEY

PulteGroup
Building a Home in the Cloud
Company:
PulteGroup
Sector:Home Construction
Driver:Joe Drouin
Role:	CIO

Revenue:
Employees:
Countries:
Locations:$7.6 billion
4,000
1700

Company IT Footprint: Currently at Pulte, there are almost 5,000 employees.
Pulte serves approximately 35 national markets across the United States, andhave 600 to 700 active communities and 36 divisional offices around the country. Its IT footprint is around 5,000 desktop endpoints.

“If I were to advise a company in a similar position, I would say
it helps to adopt a cloud-first mentality. Assume that everything isgoing to the cloud as a rule, and really challenge the exceptions. I
don’t think it’s bold anymore; it’s what you have to do today, and in
my mind, it’s proven.”
Joe Drouin, Chief Information Officer, PulteGroup

Excerpt from: Stiennon, Richard “CIO Journeys,” Secure Cloud Transformation: The CIO’s Journey. IT-Harvest Press,
2019, pp. 245–249.

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PulteGroup Journey Overview

Business Objectives

The Solution

Impact• Move forward from “accidentalarchitecture”: legacy hardware,applications, point solutions• R oadmap a cloud-centric,modular, flexible, elastic, scalable,
API-centered architecture• Reduced costs: MPLS, on-premhardware maintenance• Reduce MPLS backhauling• T ransform outdated DIY, built-onprem culture• Prioritize data-center, internet trafficwith direct connectivity• Flexibility: Simplify systems
management• S hift on-prem .NET, SQL stacks toAzure• Roll out Office 365• Faster connectivity, user
experience with local internet
breakouts• More flexible architecture:- Easier app management- Reduced administrativeoverhead• Deploy local internet breakouts

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Joe Drouin is currently theChief Information Officer atPulteGroup. He has overseen

In the words of Joe Drouin:transformations at three sep-Evaluating our IT footprint

arate companies: TRW, Kelly

I’d been part of some fascinating IT transformations in the past, but thisServices, and most recently

was certainly the most challenging. We had some legacy technology, systems, andthe PulteGroup. Pulte is oneof the largest home construction companies in the United

applications that didn’t support the business anymore. I was able to lean on my priortransformational experiences at TRW and Kelly to do the same kind of thing at Pulte.

States.

In 2015 we started focusing on what we could do around our now 12-year-old application footprint. By 2016, we were ready to hit the accelerator. We spent all of2017 laying out the roadmaps and our investment plans, building a fundamentally
new architecture—a very cloud-centered architecture—and getting everything lined
up for when the flow of investment kicked back in. As we entered 2018, we built
out the underlying foundation and new architecture—our “enterprise data hub,” aplatform for integration that broke us out of our legacy environment of a point-topoint, 20-year-old, accidental architecture, to a more deliberate, modular, looselycoupled, API-centered one with a strong footprint in the cloud.
Pulte and the cloud
When I got to Pulte, everything was built on-premises. We had a data center in ouroffice in Arizona. Almost everything was built or bought and housed in that datacenter. We had a traditional hub-and-spoke network with everything pointing backto that data center. Soon thereafter, we were running out of space, were at capacity,and had to add space and power and cooling. The cloud was tried-and-true for me,
having had much success with cloud platforms and SaaS at Kelly Services, so westarted moving to it in earnest.

Beginning our cloud journey with Office 365 and local
internet breakouts
We rolled out Office 365 and got off on-premises Exchange. Early on, we started
purchasing SaaS solutions and slowly but surely moved more and more of our footprint out of the data center and into the cloud, which meant that we had to change
the traditional hub-and-spoke model of the network. That’s when we brought in Zscaler to help. I was familiar with Zscaler from my time at Kelly, and felt like Pulte was3

“We started putting

not a dissimilar model. We have lots of small locations that are constantly opening
and closing.

local internet into thoselocations, so we didn’t

We started putting local internet into those locations, so we didn’t have to backhaul

have to backhaul all our

all our traffic to the data center in Arizona. Zscaler provided us the ability to do

traffic to the data center

that and put all the security provisions in place that we needed. We moved morein Arizona”

toward a hybrid design—we still sometimes have pipes back to the data center, butevery location has connectivity via a local internet provider. This helped give us
flexibility, but importantly it also reduced the delays we often experienced waiting
for business-class service to be brought out to residential areas in far-flung suburbs,
where often getting direct circuits took ages.

A hybrid cloud environment
As more and more of our capabilities are hosted in the cloud, it is important to beable to route traffic locally where it needs to go and back to the data center whenneeded. We still host our legacy ERP in the data center. We’re currently deploying new and updated applications to Microsoft Azure. All our custom applications
were built on .NET and SQL, so from the server OS to the database, all the way up
through the development stack and to the desktop, we’re a Microsoft environment.
As such, Azure was a natural place for us to focus.

Costs will go up short term
There is an education process for IT and the whole business as you move into thecloud. One maybe not-so-obvious thing is there is often not a direct cost savings.
During the transition stage, we are putting things in the cloud and paying by thedrink but at the same time, we can’t just turn the data center off. You can’t shut down
enough equipment in the data center fast enough to offset the cost of moving.
Ultimately, the economics of it will pay off, but for a time we’re carrying costs for ourdata center and we’re incurring new costs. The idea of pay-per-use in the cloud is agreat one. The idea that you can turn the dial up and down sounds great, though in
my experience the dial only seems to go up.

End state: flexibility
I see us three or four years from now with a much more flexible IT environment,
one that sits mainly in Microsoft’s cloud but that would be containerized to the point4

that if we decided to spread the love a little and move some things out of Azure, itwouldn’t be a problem. We will have this modular, plug-and-play architecture thatwill give us tremendous flexibility. In this scenario, we will have applications thatcan be plucked out and replaced much more easily than trying to replace a big,monolithic, three-year software development project.
I think slowly but surely we will get to a point where there’s very little
on-premises technology. At the point we are ready to entertain thenotion of replacing our finance system, I would certainly be looking
for a cloud-based system.

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