Finding the perfect reference case that highlights the entire partnership between IBM and De Cronos Groep’s ventures is a nigh impossible task. That’s why we created ‘The Company’, a fictional business that nonetheless closely resembles the kinds of clients we work for. The Company is in the midst of a digital transformation and looking for a partner that can help them tackle their digital challenges.
One thing makes The Company stand out though, and that’s that they write their own software. The Company knows that good software can be a strong differentiating factor in a highly competitive market, but worries that their department isn’t keeping up with modern standards. Additionally, as part of their digital transition, they are moving (part of) their operations to the cloud and worry about security, integration & monitoring of their applications.
In each of the following four chapters we will highlight one specific aspect of a digital transformation process. Each corresponds with a different Cronos venture, but they all have one thing in common: they use IBM’s technology stack to deliver a tailored solution to their clients.
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Software development best practices have evolved radically over the past few years in order to keep up with increasing consumer expectations and application complexity. So just like the rest of their business, The Company is now looking to modernize and partially automate their development and operations departments as well.
To help them in this endeavor they enlisted the help of FlowFactor, Cronos’ DevOps expertise center. FlowFactor’s mission is to speed up application development, shorten time to market and increase flexibility through automation. To achieve this, they use a suite of IBM tools that were designed from the ground up with a highly automated DevOps approach in mind.
At its core though, DevOps is not really about technology, but about breaking down the barriers between Development and Production. The Company noticed that the two departments had conflicting priorities: Development wants to move as quickly as possible to bring new features into production, while Operations is mainly focused on stability and uptime. The compromise was eventually settled on a monthly release cycle with strict agreements and deadlines in order to keep the peace.
This worked fine for a while, but The Company started to notice that their release cycle wasn’t keeping up with their customers’ expectations and changes to external API’s were causing issues that could take up to a month to get fixed. The Company knew that it was time for a change, but had no idea where to actually start.
Now, thanks to FlowFactor’s help and coaching, The Company is slowly but surely increasing their DevOps maturity. This is not an overnight process, as these newly combined teams take time to build trust and get used to the new way of working. But The Company is already noticing how small changes can now be pushed to production by developers completely automatically, and thanks to the introduction of automation tools the speed of development is increasing constantly as well.
DevOps is focused on the entire software development lifecycle, and therefore DevOps tools are also quite diverse, covering everything from development to monitoring and maintenance. Luckily, IBM offers a platform where all these tools are fully integrated and available at the click of a button.
Take for instance IBM Websphere Liberty, a low overhead Java EE application server for cloud-native applications and microservices. These microservices can then be deployed to Red Hat’s Openshift Platform, an open platform that allows The Company to easily manage both cloud and on-site applications. Once deployed, Instana monitors their applications for performance issues and using IBM Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps they are even able to fix issues before they start causing problems.
Software is increasingly interconnected. Both internally, exchanging information between multiple applications or even microservices, and externally through the use of API’s from external services, data sources, agencies, etc. Keeping all these components communicating nicely is not really an issue, until it really is.
Most companies start out fine, but run into issues when the number of components starts to scale and updating requirements necessitate multiple API versions to run simultaneously. A proper ‘integration design’ then quickly becomes absolutely essential, and that’s exactly what Integration Designers, our next Cronos competence center, does best.
Like many other businesses, The Company uses a number of digital tools, platforms and applications to keep their organization running smoothly. A CRM system to manage their client relations, a sales platform to track their leads, a supply chain planner, HR software, and a whole ecosystem of custom applications both offering and using API’s to/from external partners. Through a series of ad-hoc decisions and improvements, The Company arrived at a point where integration was starting to become a serious headache for the entire organization.
Enter IBM API Connect, an integration platform that enabled The Company to easily connect their cloud and on-premise applications, move data reliably with enterprise messaging, transfer data across any cloud, all with end-to-end security and encryption. Integration headaches are now a thing of the past, and The Company is vastly expanding their API monetization revenue stream.
But Integration Designers’ mission goes further than supporting The Company’s API management strategy, because The Company is now convinced that integration readiness should play a crucial role in their application design as well. They concluded that their applications should be distributed, loosely coupled and communicate asynchronously in order to accommodate new and varying data sources.
Luckily, this is exactly what Event Driven Architecture (EDA) brings to the table. EDA is a design pattern in which applications can publish and subscribe to asynchronous ‘events’, allowing for a highly flexible approach when it comes to connecting data sources and consumers.
The Company is using EDA to design a web of applications and microservices that react in real time to all kinds of important business events. For instance, when a customer places an order, this information is immediately propagated to the logistics planner, sales records are updated and the CRM system updates the client status. The perfect foundation for The Company to become a more data driven organization.
Like most businesses, The Company had a business and IT department that were constantly at odds with each other. Like Romeo and Juliet, business requirements and technical implementation long to meet, but seem destined to never fully embrace each other.
So how did The Company fix this problem? Well, they quickly realized that business and IT teams were almost literally not speaking the same language: business has a great overview of a company’s processes but no clue when it comes to technical complexities, where IT is almost completely opposite. The solution? Creating ‘fusion teams’ (check out this Gartner article if you want to know more) where business and IT work together to create solutions.
To help them in their transformation, The Company hired Roborana, Cronos’ Intelligent Automation expertise center. Roborana’s mission is to make companies run their processes more efficiently through the use of Intelligent Automation, encompassing several technologies like AI, RPA, BPM, etc.
Easier said than done, especially given we just mentioned that business and IT are speaking almost completely different languages, but this is where IBM technology comes to the rescue. With IBM’s Cloud Pak for Business Automation, business and IT can now work together in a common language, ensuring solutions can be built at a fraction of the cost and effort.
IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation is an end-to-end automation platform designed to automate work and accelerate business growth. The Business Automation Cloud Pak contains a set of integrated software modules that help you analyze workflows, design AI-infused apps with low-code tooling, assign tasks to bots and track their performance. This makes it the perfect platform to support The Company’s intelligent automation ambitions.
The Company realizes that automation should be an end-to-end process, not about just one department or just one process. Creating the kinds of teams that can achieve end-to-end automation across silos is no small feat, but luckily, this is exactly what Roborana does best.
Together with the Business Automation Cloud Pak, Roborana helps guide organizations through the various organizational and technological changes needed for the business automation journey. The result? A development team that is able to continuously improve efficiency and reduce overhead costs. And because the business side is intimately connected from day one, The Company is able to set priorities efficiently and focus on processes with the highest impact.
Security is (or should be) a huge priority for almost every business, and The Company is no different. However, because of their move to the cloud, The Company is forced to reevaluate their security policy. Due to their increasing size, they are also forced to consider attacks coming from the inside as well.
The Company quickly concluded that modern digital security is best left to security experts, so they contacted Nynox to help them out. Nynox is a company focused on cyber defense service that offers a managed Security Operations Center (SOC) and Incident Response (CSIRT) services, meaning they analyze and continuously improve your company’s security posture, all from one single location.
The secret behind Nynox’s offering? IBM QRadar SIEM, or Security Information and Events Management. QRadar SIEM is a platform that allows organizations to get intelligent security insights across all their digital systems from one central location. QRadar allows The Company to get centralized insights into logs, flows and events across on-premise, SaaS, hybrid and multi cloud environments with hundreds of prebuilt integrations. It also includes advanced analytics such as user behavior analytics (UBA), network flow insights and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate detection.
With QRadar, Nynox has set up a multi-tenant environment, offering Nynox a single pane of glass to manage all their clients from a centralized location, while still offering the highest level of data privacy protection for each client. This way, Nynox is able to offer a 24/7/365 monitoring service that ensures Nynox’s clients are always protected. The advantages for The Company are clear: they get round the clock protection by certified security experts without having to invest in their own 24/7 security operations team.
Setting up a SOC is not an easy task, given that it needs to be integrated with almost the entire application stack in order to ingest data and monitor for suspicious activity. The Company wanted to set up protection as quickly as possible, so they opted for IBM QRadar on Cloud, or QROC for short.
QROC is a cloud hosted SIEM offering that allows Nynox to set up a SOC without having to worry about infrastructure and maintenance. This has vastly reduced the amount of time needed to set up a SOC, meaning the time-to-value for The Company has been vastly reduced as well. Now, The Company can rest easily knowing that their systems are in the best possible hands, and with Nynox’s help, they are continuously improving their security posture as well.
We hope our case has inspired you to look at your own business and see where your needs overlap with The Company. All our cases are based on actual client projects, so you’ll be sure to find exactly the expertise you are looking for when you contact any of the expertise centers mentioned above.
Still not sure where to go from here?
Take our proficiency test, which will tell you exactly which aspects of your digital journey have the highest need for additional expertise. Join The Company in embracing new technology to make your business run more efficient, and soon you’ll find IBM technology and Cronos expertise to be a major part of your business’ competitive advantage.