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Customer Case Study

Tatra Banka is Slovakia’s first private bank. Established in 1990 immediately after the collapse of the communist regime, it is one of the most successful subsidiaries of the Raiffeisenbank International Group in Central and Eastern Europe. Tatra Banka is a modern universal bank with a comprehensive offering of services for both corporate and individual clients, and currently has more than 800 thousand customers. Over the past 27 years, Tatra Banka received more than 120 awards from 27 different organizations for its excellence and innovative approach to financial services, including the prestigious designation of the Best Bank in Slovakia, as well as the title of the Most Innovative Bank in CEE & CIS at the Europe Banking Awards 2016. To help customers demanding sophisticated banking services and to increase the speed of delivery of new services and innovative features, Tatra Banka started investigating DevOps principles and automation with the aim of increasing efficiency and supporting agile development. These initiatives were launched under a comprehensive umbrella DevOps programme, whose focal aim was to design and implement a universal solution for automating the entire delivery pipeline, including build to deployments across all IT environments in the organization.

ChallengesDemand for more frequent application updates is continuously increasing. In today’s business climate, applications must be updated at ever shorter intervals to rapidly meet new customer

CA Automic Release Automation keeps Tatra Banka at the forefront of innovation

BUSINESS CHALLENGES• A lot of monotonous work, need to provide people

with more room for R&D

• Increasing business demand for new IT services

• Manual processing too slow, very expensive and error-prone

• Standardization, reducing business impact of deployment errors and outages

AUTOMIC SOLUTION• Automates the entire deployment cycle

• Orchestrates the DevOps pipeline

• Manages artifacts in the continuous integration tool

• Runs the configuration tool for automated provisioning

CUSTOMER BENEFITS• Effective creation of standardized workflows and

consistent deployment processes

• Faster and more flexible application delivery from development to production

• Improved culture and collaboration between Dev and Ops in our IT department

needs and gain or maintain competitive advantage. However, delivering new functionality and software in heterogeneous environments is becoming more complex with an ever-increasing number of steps – build, test, provision, deploy. On the other hand, changes cause errors, so there is an increased focus on stability as well. These two attributes are critical priorities for Tatra Banka also, as the bank strives to drive innovation while providing reliable services.

SolutionCA Automic automated the entire deployment cycle for Tatra Banka’s many applications, not only the newest ones, which have been developed in harmony with agile development standards, but also older monoliths that were created utilizing the waterfall model. Most importantly, CA Automic now orchestrates the entire DevOps pipeline and represents the core element of the bank’s entire toolchain. CA Automic orchestrates a whole range of important

“Now, our development teams do not face any deployment limits; they are able to do deploy without depending on the capacity of operations teams, and they can do it fast and frequently – this was the biggest change in our culture and IT governance.”

Stefan Nemeth,Head of IT Delivery at Tatra Banka

Customer Case Study

Automic, the leader in business automation software owned by CA Technologies, helps enterprises drive competitive

advantage by automating their IT and business systems - from on-premise to the Cloud, Big Data and the Internet of

Things. With offices worldwide, Automic powers 2,700 customers across all industry verticals including Financial Services,

Manufacturing, Retail, Automotive and Telecommunications. More information can be found at www.automic.com.

For more information or product demonstration please visit www.automic.com

activities, such as managing artifacts in the continuous integration tool, running the configuration tool for automated provisioning, triggering the tools for automated testing and so on. CA Automic Release Automation (CA ARA) also covers the entire release process with an approval mechanism and notifications for every environment, from development through testing and integration all the way to production, and is thus used by all involved departments. CA ARA manages access rights and authorizations so that an individual employee’s ability to create artifacts and perform deployments is strictly based on his or her role and responsibilities.

Key FeaturesARA is an open platform providing compatibility and wide-ranging integration with other DevOps tools. It was specifically designed to suit the needs of complex and heterogeneous IT environments. Despite its complexity and enterprise-class robustness, the platform comes with an easy to use web based interface providing a superb intuitive user experience. Process designers are able to rely on a sophisticated model based deployment architecture and benefit from a large number of reusable objects including predefined templates and action packs for a wide range of third-party technologies constituting the rapidly evolving continuous delivery landscape as well as the option of creating custom action packs addressing specific needs of each organization.

Benefits“From the early beginnings, we realized that we will need to automate all areas of our software delivery pipeline if we want to achieve greater efficiency and increase the speed of delivery. Therefore, we were looking for a suitable DevOps toolchain that would provide a robust and comprehensive architecture as well as wide-ranging compatibility for integration. Our project team spent many weeks testing and evaluating different solutions available on the market. In the end, CA Automic proved to be more powerful than any other solution, and its features fully covered all our requirements. The DevOps ecosystem we created around CA Automic supports all types of applications, from Java through Ruby to Microsoft world. These days, CA Automic became very popular at our bank, as all new projects are running through the automated delivery pipeline and everyone understands that DevOps is a key factor for faster and more effective delivery,” Andrej Šimkovič and Peter Mahut, Leaders of the DevOps Initiative at Tatra Banka.

Deployments are 5-times FasterCA Automic is transforming the speed and quality of Tatra Banka’s release processes. Andrej illustrates this with the recent large-scale deployment of a new banking application that supports loans for small-business customers. “Normally, it would have taken several hours for us to complete all the necessary steps needed to build, approve, and deploy a new release. With CA Automic, it’s a matter of couple of clicks and the entire release process completes

within 15 minutes. Automated deployment now typically requires only 6 minutes instead of 30 minutes of manual work. Plus, the increased reliability means that there is very little risk of disrupting the business operations.”Peter adds, “CA Automic allows you to reimagine the ways you approach releases. There is so much ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality at your disposal that you can start thinking of new approaches of doing things that in the long term bring the organization even more value. We found that CA Automic’s robustness and flexibility give us the ability to quickly adapt to various situations and changing requirements from both process and technology perspectives.”

Conclusion CA Automic is a crucial enabler of the very successful DevOps transformation at Tatra Banka, which provides the bank with great efficiency, speed, as well as savings when delivering changes to IT applications. This project is also one of the main pillars supporting Tatra Banka’s ability to safeguard its position at the forefront of innovation in financial services. According to the DevOps team at Tatra Banka, partnership with CA Automic was indeed one of the most important critical success factors in accomplishing their organization’s DevOps transformation, as CA Automic’s release automation solution meets all essential technological requirements necessary for creating a universal and comprehensive DevOps ecosystem.

“CA ARA is an open system particularly suitable for complex and heterogeneous environments like ours. The availability of reusable objects, parameters and templates means that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we are creating a new process flow. Being able to orchestrate the entire DevOps pipeline within the same technology stack provides an important advantage for our organization. The platform supports our standards, efficient architecture and we are ready for migrations to cloud in the future.”

Martin Galo,Head of IT Operations at Tatra Banka