Intellect Design Arena

Vision

Embracing a cloud-native approach to build, test and deploy applications – while lowering infrastructure overheads

Intellect wanted to enable developers spread across different domains to build applications that were more secure and scalable with great agility. Applications would need to be rapidly deployed, patched and scaled in order to accelerate development, test and production cycles.

To achieve this, Intellect would need to move away from an existing virtual-machine environment – a move that involved significant complexity.

As experts in the application development space, Intellect wanted to focus on their core expertise without having to maintain and operate the underlying container and microservices.

Another challenge to consider was cost – as a leader in a competitive space – Intellect needed to ensure that the refactoring efforts would be justified by lower operational and cost overheads going forward.

Transformation

A solution-led approach toward application modernization

The engagement began with NTT and Intellect conducting joint workshops to define objectives with clear outcomes. Over the course of these workshops, NTT was able to demonstrate the performance and cost benefits of their managed, secure Containers-as-a-Service offering deployed on both Red Hat OpenShift as well as Kubernetes (K8s) – providing fully automated operations for managing hybrid and multicloud deployments.

Leveraging on-demand hybrid cloud for performance and cost efficiencies

Intellect’s container clusters are distributed across NTT’s on-demand SimpliCloud and SimpliVPC cloud platforms, allowing Intellect the freedom to choose from multiple always-on, instantly available cloud platform options each time they want to deploy (or redeploy) a container cluster.

This hybrid cloud model means that not only can containers be deployed across multiple on-demand cloud platforms – both public and private – but Intellect can instantly migrate and redeploy applications within these cloud platforms seamlessly.

This was a key element of consideration for Intellect as it allows them to choose from multiple cloud execution venues based on specific project requirements while meeting business objectives.

Establishing continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and DevOps approach

The company worked with NTT’s solution architects to create and operate container clusters that automate and accelerate project development from start to production delivery.

Intellect’s developers, operations, and other staff are now able to effectively collaborate on new features and services to bring customers faster, more engaging experiences.

Results

Leveraging an agile partnership

• Agility & velocity: Combining CI / CD with NTT’s CaaS platform running OpenShift has allowed Intellect to reach much faster delivery to market, enhanced scalability, and enabled automation across their cloud landscape.
• Business focus: NTT’s managed CaaS platform running gives Intellect the flexibility and ease of use to deploy applications quickly, so their developers can spend time creating innovation for their customers, not on operational tasks.
• Efficiency: Moving from a competitive public cloud platform to NTT’s Hybrid Cloud CaaS platform created significant performance efficiencies for Intellect, and lowered costs by over 30%.

Adopting a more agile, collaborative DevOps approach supported by NTT’s CaaS services has helped Intellect Design Arena’s developers, architects, infrastructure experts, and platform teams to work together more effectively to build and update innovative products and services, and to maintain their standing as a leading provider of financial technologies.