How Medecision Radically Improved Their Software Delivery

Medecision recently undertook a large transformation to migrate to a new cloud-based infrastructure. Driving the transformation was the need to migrate two non-cloud-based data centers to the cloud, in order to fashion a 100% software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery model.

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 Founded in 1988, Medecision is a premier provider of population health management solutions for care organizations, hospitals, integrated delivery networks, and other companies in healthcare.

The Challenges Facing Medecision

“Medecision’s biggest challenge was finding a way to move from a deployment process that was mostly manual to full automation,” said Zach Penska, Senior Manager of DevOps for Medecision. “As we migrated to a SaaS organization and delivery model, we needed to transform our internal process or we would not be able to scale.” Software releases were manual, slow, complex and error-prone.Before the shift to automated deployment, eight people worked for 48 hours to upgrade 6 applications – that’s more than 3,000 minutes per environment.

• Manual methods of deploying new releases were slow and inefficient
• Process would not scale to accommodate new SaaS model
• No way to create release reports and analyze release metrics
• Poor coordination of tasks in the delivery pipeline caused extensive delay

“We wanted to leverage the best-in-class automation capability of our chosen partner so we could focus our time and energy on what we do best—our applications,” said Penska.

 

The Solution

After five months of evaluating various vendors’ solutions, notably Ansible, CA Release Automation, Chef, Puppet, and XebiaLabs, Medecision chose XebiaLabs’ XL Release to manage release pipelines and XL Deploy to automate deployments for all of their SaaS applications. They found that provisioning tools such as Ansible, Chef and Puppet did a great job of provisioning, but provisioning was not the business problem they were trying to solve.

“We chose XebiaLabs because it best met our business need to focus on release automation rather than the provisioning process,” said John Lysen, CIO of Medecision.

 

1000x Faster Deployments

XebiaLabs enabled Medecision to jump-start its SaaS strategy, replacing all-manual software delivery with full automation.It now takes 2 hours to upgrade 50 apps. That’s less than 3 minutes per environment. And only 2 people are involved.XebiaLabs products provide powerful benefits for Medecision:

• Greatly accelerated application deployments that are now completely scalable
• Seamless orchestration of all elements in the software delivery process
• Reliable software deployments with minimal errors
• Real-time visibility into status and metrics for all components in the delivery process

“Seven months ago we were doing software delivery manually and had six environments in our infrastructure. It would take eight resources 48 hours to upgrade these environments over a weekend. Now, with XebiaLabs, we are able to do 50 environments in two hours. The scalability of the product is amazing. Our software delivery speed has improved more than 1000X. We achieved remarkable ROI in just a few months.” - Zach Penska, Senior Manager of DevOps for Medecision   Medecision needed to create an automated, repeatable process that could scale as they rapidly increased the number of customer applications they maintained. XL Deploy and XL Release enabled Medecision to progress rapidly from a completely unscalable manual process to fully scalable, secure and reliable automated deployment.Read the full Medecision Case Study