The Client

FICO is the leading analytics software company used by every Fortune 10 company, 75% of the world’s largest banks, ALL top 10 pharmaceuticals, 700+ insurers and 400+ large retailers, protecting two-thirds of all global credit cards from fraud – with more than $1B USD in revenue annually. FICO’s strength as a technology company is advanced modeling of data, enabling companies worldwide to make intelligent business decisions.  More than 10 billion FICO credit scores are sold annually.

The Challenge

FICO decided to undergo a cloud native transformation to enable their clients to leverage FICO products through their Analytics Cloud- not just on-premise installations. To do so, they needed to move from on-premise, manual installation and configuration processes, to more DevOps and cloud native processes built on automation & model-driven concepts.  

After evaluating 19 platforms, FICO selected Cloudify, enabling them to onboard their Debt Manager Product, and offer it as SaaS to its end users within just a few months, and roll out core business applications in hours rather than days. 

Before Cloudify, FICO’s products were primarily sold as on-premise solutions, that required a lot of manual setup, configuration, and installation time.  With the onset of cloud, and the demand for hosted solutions from their customer-base, FICO set out to build their FICO Analytics Cloud platform and needed to onboard many of their products, to effectively provide them as hosted solutions.

Technical Use Case

Cloudify enabled FICO to take their complex technology stack comprised of code, various networks and network appliances, servers (including VMware) and cloud (AWS) – built on diverse technologies such as JBoss, Couchbase, F5, Microsoft Reporting Services, SQL Server Always-On, Pentaho, as well as continuous integration processes built with Jenkins, Foreman, Bitbucket, and Puppet for AWS, and automate the entire application lifecycle end-to-end.  

With Cloudify in place, FICO received a complete platform to orchestrate infrastructure, applications, and networking layers, together with the management over the entire lifecycle, including operational workflows, right up until decommission. Essentially this made it possible to automate all configuration, installation, alongside functional approvals including network, server, storage and DevOps teams that were largely working in silos before the implementation of Cloudify.

Why Cloudify

Using Cloudify, FICO was now able to model their application in a simple declarative YAML blueprint, capturing all components in the deployment including:

• Infrastructure resources
• Software components
• Actions & workflows to perform on that environment 
• State of the environment

Using Cloudify gives FICO a complete lifecycle manager that is also programmable, with a data layer on top and a backend database via Cloudify Manager.  Being able to manage the full end to end lifecycle of the application through the Cloudify Manager, and its UI, provided the full platform FICO was looking for.  

“Cloudify has the strongest lifecycle management, architecture design & possibilities, alongside programmable and extensible framework vs. the other platforms evaluated, to enable our next-generation FICO Analytics Cloud. When you really want to scale, you need to manage your applications as data – managing your infrastructure as code can only scale so far – and can only scale by hiring more programmers.”  Matt Miller, Software Engineering Director, Global Technology Services

The Outlook

FICO plans to automate a large number of product deployments, especially those with more legacy architectures that are not built for containers or microservices.  In addition, with Cloudify in play, the FICO team plans to automate all technical steps in the deployment process, leaving only business and finance-related steps manual – significantly slashing deployment times.

A primary focus for FICO is speeding up deployment times for their suite of products using Cloudify – and even for their existing on-premise clients as well, by enabling end-to-end automation of the setup and configuration of the 4-5 environments manually set up per client – a process takes up to a year per client.  Using Cloudify, FICO will be able to deliver these services in one single work week.  Clear time to value, delivered.

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