Case Study

Stater successfully
implements DevOps withDigital.ai

HIGHLIGHTSTime to roll out new machines reduced from 1-2 days to 30
minutes
Software deployment time dropped from 1-2 weeks to 30
minutesStater planned to release software 4 times more frequently inthe next 6 months

Challenge
Stater, the Netherlands’ #1 mortgage broker, handles
mortgages for premium financial services companies
and is aiming for double digit growth in their market
share over the next three years. To do that, they know
they need to move fast and execute flawlessly. Stater’s
IT department works hard to provide applications that
support the end-to-end mortgage process — forcustomers, for agents, and for the banks themselves.
They are currently focused on two major initiatives:
Improving their systems to onboard new customers
and “Digitization,” which involves creating portals that
consumers, brokers, and the banks themselves can use
to manage their mortgages Also, their team has a vision— they call it the “Accello Project” — to speed up theacceptance process for mortgage seekers, so people
know in only one hour if their application will beaccepted. Overarching these goals, the IT group hasa mantra for quality: they want to get it all “firsttime right.”

Industry: Mortgage Services
Size: 11,400 Employees
Location: Global

Challenge

Speed up time to market for
new features and applications,and reduce the number ofproduction problems causedby new releases.

Solution

Agile DevOps processfeaturing Digital.ai Release
and Digital.ai Deploy toautomate, standardize, andorchestrate the softwaredelivery process1

“Mostimportantly,
the team has
improved theirrelease quality,
and thenumber ofpost-releaseproduction
problems has
droppedsubstantially.
Ton Kueter, Manager, IT
Development for Stater

About two years ago, Stater was having challenges
getting software into production quickly, and evenmore challenges in production after new releases
were deployed. Releases were sometimes delayed aweek — or even two — and more than once resulted
in post-production fire fighting for several weeks after
deployment. At first, Stater looked to improve theprocess with old-school methods: multiple checklists,
the “four eyes” principle, and reducing velocity. Then
Stater realized that old-school steps were the oppositeof what they really needed to do. Stater learned about
continuous delivery at a Digital.ai seminar and had an
epiphany: release smaller chunks of code, more often.
And if you have manual steps in your process,automate them!

Solution
Stater started implementing Digital.ai Release andDigital.ai Deploy in the fall of 2014 to speed up time
to market, automate processes, and improve thequality of code that goes into production. Now all
agile/DevOps teams at Stater are using Digital.ai
Deploy and Digital.ai Release — about 300 people
across 25 teams. In addition, their PaaS, IaaS, andrelease management teams all use both tools.
Digital.ai Release manages Stater’s automatedsoftware delivery pipeline and platform automation
pipeline. Most steps are now automated, but Staterprefers to keep some steps manual for now, such as
waiting for approval by their cross-functional Change
Advisory Board. Fortunately, Digital.ai Release isdesigned to allow just such flexibility. Digital.ai
Release also gives insight into Stater’s 25 test
environments. On the deployment side, Digital.ai
Deploy is called on by Jenkins to automatically
deploy all of the software for Stater’s mid-office,back-office, and corresponding interfaces. The teamwill be adding additional applications for bothDigital.ai Release and Digital.ai Deploy, such as their
document processing engine and data warehouse,over the coming year.

2Software deployment time
dropped from 1-2 weeks to
30 minutes

30 minutes to deploy
software instead of 1-2
weeks with the old tools

Release software 4x more
frequently in the next 6
monthsBenefits
Stater’s agile/DevOps initiative with Digital.ai
Release and Digital.ai Deploy is ongoing and has
already yielded good results. “First time right”:
According to Ton Kueter, Manager, IT Development
for Stater, “Perhaps most importantly, release quality
is now substantially better, and the number of postrelease production problems has dropped. The team isthrilled to be able to move on to the next release rather
than fighting production crises, and the entire
organization is happier with the quality.” Faster release
cycle: For now, the team is more focused on ensuring
quality and improving testing, but in the next six months,
they expect releases to happen every two weeks, which
is four times more often than when they began thisinitiative. Lower costs: Finally, overall IT costs havealready been reduced on a recurring basis!

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Specifically, the time to roll out new machines has been reduced from 1-2 days
to 30 minutes. Software deployment time has dropped from 1-2 weeks to 30minutes. They could also accelerate the release process, aiming to releasesoftware four times more frequently in the next six months. Already, Staterhas greatly reduced the number of post-release production issues Stater has
also noticed several secondary benefits. DevOps teams can work moreautonomously, which makes team members very happy. The engineers getquick feedback, helping them create more value, make fewer mistakes, and fix
the mistakes faster. “There are not many tools like either Digital.ai Release orDigital.ai Deploy. Both tools have an excellent UI, are easy to use, and do a great
job of presenting information visually, which gives us much-needed insight into
the state of our releases,” Kueter continued. “As well, both products fit well intoour current landscape and make it easy to integrate the different platforms andlanguages we use. We love the flexibility. It’s easy to adjust the process to add
new steps, and easy to add new systems.”“There are not many tools like either Digital.ai
Release or Digital.ai Deploy. Both tools have an
excellent UI, are easy to use, and do a great jobof presenting information visually, which gives
us much needed insight into the state of ourreleases so we can better serve our customers.
Ton Kueter, Manager, IT Development forStater4

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