A leading international insurance carrier finds that automated release management makes its developers more productive, gets updates into the hands of its end users faster, and improves its global agility.

1. Accelerating software releases
through DevOps
A leading international insurance carrier finds that automated release
management makes its developers more productive, gets updates into the
hands of its end users faster, and improves its global agility.
Executive Summary
Client’s challenge
To improve software
deployments by:
• Automating software release
management to make
productivity gains
• Increasing the frequency of
updates
• Reducing the complexity of
releases to avoid downtime
Solutions
Build a new system for software
update releases by:
• Outlining a business case for
a faster and more flexible
operating model
• Designing a DevOps-based
software release strategy that
brings developers and IT
together
• Deploying commercial tools
to adapt the strategy to the
client’s legacy technology
Impact on client’s business
• The company hopes to see an
overall 2% to 3%
improvement in
development productivity
• By automating rollbacks, the
company can reduce
downtime that can cost up to
$30,000 per hour
Insurance
Consulting
May 2015
“With DevOps, development and
operations collaborate
throughout the entire service
lifecycle, from design through
development to distribution.”
....

2. © 2015 PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the United States member firm, and may sometimes refer to the PwC network.
Each member firm is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. This content is for general information purposes
only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.
Client’s challenge:
Today’s enterprises are leveraging
software platforms to transform
their business models and engage
employees, partners, and
customers as efficiently as
possible. It’s a smart strategy, but
executing it can be a challenge. IT
needs to achieve High Velocity IT
without compromising on
stakeholder expectations around
experience, quality, and control.
And while startups may be nimble
enough to experiment freely with
cutting-edge development tactics,
larger and more traditional
organizations with legacy delivery
methodologies, infrastructure, and
governance can be slow to change.
When it comes to the deployment
of software applications across an
enterprise, speed is of the essence.
There are huge costs for
organizations that take too long to
distribute apps. Developers sit idle
while end users are deprived of the
latest and best possible
functionality. Manual support and
intervention is slow and costly.
That’s why proactive businesses
are turning to an emerging
movement–called DevOps—to
achieve High Velocity IT. With
DevOps, development and
operations collaborate throughout
the entire service lifecycle, from
design through development to
distribution, to support—putting
an end to the traditional hurry-up-
and-wait problem.
DevOps can automate the actual
migration of an app from its
creators to its end users, saving
time and money along the way.
One leading international
insurance carrier began to look for
a DevOps solution when it faced
three significant challenges. First,
it needed to support global
software deployments, and
without automation, its team
would need to grow substantially
and co-locate around the world to
meet the carrier’s needs.
Next, it needed to improve on its
twice-weekly releases. Why
couldn’t it update applications
daily or even many times a day?
And finally, the carrier needed to
clean up complexities in its release
process that were caused by
multiple systems, badly positioned
gatekeepers, and an inability to
roll back to a previous state when
necessary.
PwC’s solution:
The carrier’s CIO of Enterprise
Services called on PwC to develop
a business case to demonstrate the
value of DevOps-inspired
automated release management,
and to participate in a Proof of
Concept to demonstrate tangible
positive outcomes. The goals:
 Lower costs by achieving
higher utilization of
development resources
 Improve quality through
standardization
 Increase speed of
delivery through
automation
 Become more agile by
providing better delivery of
services globally
PwC assembled a multi-
disciplinary team of DevOps
specialists and IT strategists to
conduct multiple working sessions
over four weeks with the carrier’s
leadership and IT operations
teams. Together they came up
with success criteria and locked
down the business case for an
operating model more closely
aligned to a DevOps culture.
Working with a key alliance
partner, PwC also demonstrated
the value of using commercial
tools to aid in automating release
management in the carrier’'s
complex legacy technology
environment.
PwC’s High Velocity IT framework
powered by DevOps includes
assessment tools to analyze
current capabilities and maturity
levels; reference architectures to
identify required capabilities and
define the software delivery
building blocks; organization and
governance models; and
accelerators and pre-built
components to harness leading
technologies. It includes:
 Business alignment
including High Velocity IT
workshops; assessment
and strategy; and
continuous delivery proof
of concept.
 Business enablement
including continuous
delivery for mobility and
digital commerce.
 IT delivery model
transformation
including organizational
change management; end-
to-end delivery
orchestration; rapid
engineering; and
continuous insight.

3. © 2015 PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the United States member firm, and may sometimes refer to the PwC network.
Each member firm is a separate legal entity. Please see www.pwc.com/structure for further details. This content is for general information purposes
only, and should not be used as a substitute for consultation with professional advisors.
This framework can help design an
IT delivery model to achieve High
Velocity IT that can:
 Accelerate time to
market for new
capabilities
 Improve the quality of
deployed software
 Reduce the complexity
of the software delivery
pipeline
 Lower costs of
implementation and
maintenance
 Rapidly sense and
respond to changing
business needs
Impact on client’s
business:
Once the new automated release
management system is fully
functional, the carrier will likely
experience continuous global
deployment of applications
triggered by the development team
with minimal intervention or
manual work. It will likely
experience a reduced cycle time
and a reduction in the effort
needed to attain consistent and
reliable delivery of software
solutions.
With the ability to support “as
needed” deployments on any
schedule, developers will have less
idle time and become more
productive. Should the need arise,
automated rollbacks will allow for
rapid recovery and minimal
downtime of target environments,
a crucial improvement given that
the carrier estimates that
downtime can cost $30,000 per
hour.
In fact, DevOps-inspired
automated release management
has the potential to improve
deployment and release
management efficiency for a
carrier by 35 percent as resources
are allocated to other business
critical projects; to cut project
auditing and compliance costs by
up to 50 percent; and to mitigate
release errors by up to 30 percent.
For enterprises demanding
software systems that are fast,
flexible, robust, and cost-efficient,
those kinds of improvements are
hard to resist.
“DevOps-inspired automated release management has
the potential to improve deployment productivity by
35% and reduce migration time by up to 80%.”
For more information, please visit
www.pwc.com/us/newitplatform
Or contact
Rohit Antao, Principal,
US DevOps Leader
rohit.antao@us.pwc.com
Nauman Noor, Director,
Financial Services
nauman.noor@us.pwc.com