Aspen Marketing Services
Learn how Aspen Marketing Services dramatically accelerated application release times, increased quality and mitigated risk by deploying with Nolio.
CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT
- .NET
- Oracle PL/SQL
- MS TFS
- Homegrown applications
THE CHALLENGE
To find a consistent and reliable solution to improve the speed, quality and accuracy of more than 250 application deployments a month.
As the U.S.A's largest privately-held marketing agency, Aspen Marketing Services employs 750 staff in offices throughout North America. The agency builds long-term relationships with prominent global clients.
In order to keep up with business demands, Aspen needs to deploy changes multiple times a day across hundreds of applications. To maintain its position as a leader in its field, Aspen must ensure its application releases are consistently deployed on-time and without errors.
PREVIOUS PROCESSES
Aspen's release processes were inconsistent, manual and expensive, leading them to initially consider building their own script-based application deployment solution.
A highly-skilled release manager would define a deployment work item on the MS Team Foundation Server (TFS) and include all the necessary information for the release. Operations teams then needed to work with development to prepare the release based on the work item, which involved creating batch files, copying files between environments, updating folders and permissions, and retrieving builds from source control. This process was time-consuming, involved many steps and was prone to errors.
Additional areas of concern included:
- Application deployments were managed by each of the three application development teams and a costly 'after hours' operations shift
- Release processes were not consistent between the teams, and end results were specifically dependent on the skill set of the individual release teams involved
- Aspen Marketing Services was challenged to accurately predict their release service to the business since deployments could take between two to six hours
- Due to frequent manual changes, processes were often prone to errors
Rick Goddard, CIO
THE SOLUTION
With Nolio ASAP, Aspen established a reliable and consistent automation of its release processes.
With Nolio ASAP and MS Team Foundation Server, Aspen was able to automate all the steps of the release process. A reliable, predictable and repeatable automatic process was established, which accelerated release times and ensured consistency across development, QA and operations - regardless of which team executed the release.
Nolio ASAP installation and deployment was quick and easy. After a short internal training session was conducted, IT staff members from application development and operations were able to use the system. Within a few days, teams were up and running and all processes were automated resulting in immediate measurable value for Aspen Marketing Services.
Ted Loomos, Vice President, Architecture and Development
'Marathon' deployments that previously took two to six hours are now completed in a couple of minutes. As the system is predictable, time slots for release windows can be precisely allocated and employees from all teams can consistently and accurately manage application deployments. Aspen Marketing Services enjoys the benefits of Nolio ASAP across their entire application portfolio today.
ASPEN MARKETING TODAY
By adopting Nolio's application deployment solutions, Aspen has:
- Eliminated the need for development teams to work after hours
- Dramatically reduced release errors
- Freed staff to complete other tasks
- Eradicated the need for an extra development person to support releases
- Increased the number of releases done in a release window
- Improved interdepartmental collaboration between operations, development and QA.
Jordan Baugh, Application Development Manager
Further Reading
- Download the Aspen Case Study »
- View the TFS Webinar »
- Download White Papers from our Resource Library »
- Check out other Nolio Case Studies »
