Enabling application modernization through containers for Intellect Design Arena

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

To achieve this, Intellect would need to move away from their 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 containers and microservices.

Cost was an important consideration. As a leader in a competitive environment, Intellect needed to ensure that the refactoring efforts would be justified by lower operational and cost overheads going forward.

The engagement began with NTT DATA and Intellect conducting joint workshops to define objectives with clear outcomes. Over the course of these workshops, we were able to demonstrate the performance and cost benefits of our managed, secure CaaS deployed on both Red Hat OpenShift and 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 DATA’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 also instantly migrate and redeploy applications within these cloud platforms seamlessly. This was a key consideration for Intellect as it allows them to choose from multiple cloud execution venues based on specific project requirements while meeting business objectives.

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

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

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

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

Agility and velocity: Combining CI/CD with NTT DATA’s CaaS running OpenShift has helped Intellect bring products to market faster, improve scalability and enabled them to automate more of their cloud environment.

Business focus: The flexibility of NTT DATA’s managed CaaS makes it easier for Intellect to deploy applications quickly, so developers can spend more time creating innovating for customers instead of handling operational tasks.

Efficiency: Moving from a public cloud platform to NTT DATA’s hybrid cloud CaaS significantly improved performance for Intellect and reduced costs by more than 30%.