ENGAGEMENT
The Cloud Organization of a large U.S. technology company required assistance managing the launch of its large public cloud-like private cloud. DayBlink Consulting planned, coordinated and supported operational readiness and go-live of the new private cloud platform to attract and onboard customers, ultimately reducing public cloud costs and improving overall security.
PROBLEM
Many internal customers (product and app solutions) overlooked VMware and OpenStack private cloud options and hosted their products and applications on public cloud platforms, which led to increasing company spend on public cloud and rising application and data security concerns. Internal teams preferred public cloud options as they offered several core features unavailable with the private cloud solutions. From the internal customer’s perspective, the private cloud solutions were opaque, slow and inflexible. The Cloud organization knew attracting customers to a new private cloud solution would require a deep understanding of customer needs and a platform designed to meet those needs. The challenge was that there were dozens of internal application and product customers with a widely varied set of requirements across performance, geography, security, capacity, and more, and that these requirements were rapidly evolving.
SOLUTION
DayBlink Consulting led the strategic planning and execution for the new public cloud-like private cloud platform including the design, build, testing and migration of customers. The engagement involved three phases: planning, execution and enablement. In the planning phase, we created and managed a product backlog of nearly 200 features and requirements, instantiated readiness processes and procedures (e.g. product increment and custom code reviews to ensure security compliance) and planned the overarching governance structure. During execution, we managed program activities, applied agile methodologies to course correct with changing priorities and new discoveries, monitored delivery team velocity to project critical paths to product release dates, managed the testing of 1,000s of feature and requirement test cases, and designed customer experience and migration plans. In the final enablement phase of the engagement, we managed all aspects of customer experience including marketing strategy, communications and training and migration journey. DayBlink organized customer onboarding, implemented feedback collection mechanisms to understand pain points and continuously improve the platform and developed customer marketing materials.
The beta testing initiative formed a pivotal component of the launch approach. A limited set of application teams received access to an early version of the platform to get comfortable with the new product and provide early feedback. This was crucial to the successful release of the platform since we were able to incorporate important fixes and enhancements before they were made generally available.
The new cloud platform included many customer-desired features, including: a simple interface for customers to navigate, self-serve capabilities, elastic resources and consumption and spend reports.
RESULT
The client reduced its overall reliance and spend on public cloud through successfully launching the new private cloud platform and migrating dozens of application teams. Internal customer satisfaction improved through the development of customer experience programs and operationalizing platform SLAs and SLOs. We launched the new platform with minimal technical or performance challenges thanks to the operational readiness processes. The cloud organization successfully upskilled to own and manage the platform through training and review of the documented procedures and runbooks.