Case Study

Ullink doubles deployments
and achieves zero production
failures with Digital.ai

HIGHLIGHTS
No deployment issues in production, down from 1-2 errors per
month
Deployments take about 10 minutes. Previous deployments tookfrom 30 minutes to 5 hours
Doubled the number of deployments, from 2,000 to 4,000+ permonth
Faster delivery of applications and features to clients due toelimination of bottlenecks in operations

Industry: Software & Tech Services
Size: now part of Broadridge(10,000 employees)

Challenge

Location: Global

Ullink provides global, award-winning, multi-asset trading
technology and infrastructure that is trusted by the world’s
top-tier banks, brokers, and trading venues, from New York toTokyo. Since 2001, Ullink has been one of the fastest growing
technology companies in the financial industry.

Challenge

Ullink offers clients the freedom to choose from modular
products tailored to their individual needs, as well as fullyserviced solutions for an entire trading infrastructure,
supported by global data centers. Ullink’s agile technology
can be deployed within a client’s existing infrastructure, aspart of a fully managed service or through a hybrid model.
Given the mission-critical and high-stakes nature of Ullink’s
customer base, it was difficult to accept any production
failures at all; considering the consequences, there were noadequate excuses. Ullink’s customers had zero tolerance for
failures; two production errors per month were two too many.

Ullink could not meet the goalof zero deployment failure
per month.​They needed toauto-deploy more than 1,000
changes in production month.
The company did not have theability to create and enforce
rules across apps andenvironments.​

Solution

After seeing a demo of theDigital.ai Deploy, Ullink
knew it would meet theirdeployment automation
requirements and be easy touse for their teams, who had
a wide range of technicalskills.

1

“Digital.ai was thecornerstone of thechanges we madeto rebuild ourentire softwaredelivery platform.
We moved frommicro-sized manualchanges toautomated full
application
deployments.
Jonathan Berdan, CTO of
Customer Service andOperations

When production engineers forgot a step or wrote code
incorrectly, their manually executed deployments failed.
Equally challenging, they had reached the limits of theirability to scale these manual processes; they were alreadydeploying 1,000 changes per month and their deployment
needs were growing. Ullink knew they needed to makechanges to move to zero production-related errors, butthey didn’t know where to start or what they needed fromtheir tools.

Solution
Ullink considered a homegrown approach to automating
their deployments. They quickly realized that was too
ambitious and started shopping for packaged solutions.
“We started by looking at provisioning tools like Chef,
Puppet, and Ansible to build out our DevOps plans,” said
Jonathan Berdah, CTO of Customer Service and Operations
at Ullink. “At a DevOps convention in Paris, we watched ademonstration of the [Digital.ai Deploy]. We immediately
understood the limitations we would encounter if we tried
to repurpose these provisioning tools to automate
deployments. We looked no further after that, because[Digital.ai] met our needs for fully automated and selfservice deployments, granular control over user roles andprivileges, and integrations with existing tools.”
Digital.ai’s graphical user interface (GUI) was also a big
differentiating feature for Ullink. The GUI removed thenecessity of technical scripting and enabled team memberswith any technical background to deploy software.

2Deployments now take an averageof ten minutes, down from anaverage of 30 minutes. Previous
deployments took up to five hours

Doubled the number of
deployments: now automatically
deploying > 4,000 changes across
UAT & production per month, up
from < 2,000

No deployment issues in production,
down from 1-2 errors per monthBenefits
Ullink discovered that Digital.ai wasn’t just a solution for
deployment automation; it also helped them rethink theirentire software delivery system. “[Digital.ai] was thecornerstone of the changes we made to rebuild our entire
software delivery platform. We moved from micro-sizedmanual changes to automated full application
deployments,” said Jonathan.
Digital.ai gave Ullink the control they needed to manage
who could do what tasks and when, and the ability to show
statuses of all their applications and releases acrossenvironments. Ullink’s focus is now on executing changes
that drive business results, rather than on the process bywhich they make the changes. Before, they reviewed eachprocess to ensure it was well written and contained all thenecessary steps; now, they don’t even think about it.
Previously they had to sign onto physical servers to
perform tasks, which, since people are human, sometimes
happened on the wrong machine or the wrong task. It waspainful to explain to their customers what happened.

3

Now that the process is automated, it’s difficult to do the wrong task at all.
Ullink easily trained their staff on their new deployment process with Digital.ai,and today anyone can execute a deployment.
Previously their process was manual, and testing and production environments
were drifting apart. Using Digital.ai forced Ullink to align their environments
and configurations to create a standardized approach and unified view of theirdeployment process. With this insight and redesigned process, Ullink has
reduced its average deployment time from 30 minutes to ten minutes andlowered the maximum deployment time from five hours to 25 minutes. Even
better, production engineers no longer create a bottleneck that slows down
the deployment process. “Within six months of implementing [Digital.ai], wedoubled our deployment capacity to over 4,000 automatic deployments permonth, up from less than 2,000 manual deployments per month. And
production is error-free,” Jonathan noted with satisfaction.

“Within six months of implementing[Digital.ai], we doubled our deployment
capacity to over 4,000 automatic
deployments per month, up from less than
2,000 manual deployments per month. And
production is error-free.
Jonathan Berdan, CTO of Customer Serviceand Operations

4

UNIFIED DEVOPS PLATFORM​
Integrate DevOps & Security capabilities to enable continuous delivery of software​

Digital.ai.2022

The Digital.ai Difference ​POWERED BY ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE​
Generate predictive insights that provide the intelligence to make smarter investments​

CONNECTED TO THE ENTERPRISE​
Connect to existing processes, applications and infrastructure to propel innovation that find newmarket opportunities

Digital.ai AI-powered DevOps Platform

About Digital.ai
Digital.ai is an industry-leading technology company dedicated to helping Global 5000 enterprises achieve digital transformation goals. The company’s AIpowered DevOps platform unifies, secures, and generates predictive insights across the software lifecycle. Digital.ai empowers organizations to scale
software development teams, continuously deliver software with greater quality and security while uncovering new market opportunities and enhancing
business value through smarter software investments.
Additional information about Digital.ai can be found at digital.ai/ and on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Learn more at Digital.ai©2022 Digital.ai is a trademark of Digital.ai Software, Inc.

5