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Video Transcript

0:00:02.4 Martin: Trend Micro is the global leader in cloud workload and endpoint security. In cybersecurity, the threat landscape is really evolving and evolving quickly, so we need to also be able to move quick and provide that protection to our customers and to ourselves as well.

0:00:17.9 Martin: So one of our key applications is Cloud One and Cloud One Workload Security, and a few years ago we made an effort to move that to a SaaS offering. In order to do that, we needed to take some of the existing applications that already added a lot of value to our customers and evolve them so that they’re adapted to the SaaS environment and be able to scale much, much higher. In this transformation, we’re faced with three options. Either we write new, we rewrite the applications, either we try to lift and shift to more modern compute platforms, or we modernize and rearchitecture, refactor the application to adapt it to the scale of the cloud. So when we looked into lift and shift, we found that even though it would help with the compute and moving the compute to the cloud and containers and be cost-effective, it did not provide what we wanted in terms of team velocity, helping the teams move faster. So we quickly moved towards modernization instead and refactoring the code, but that proved to be very, very difficult. So of course, tons of dependencies, million lines of code, 10,000s of classes, very difficult for a human to actually go in and grasp that complexity.

0:01:21.2 Martin: So we quickly turned towards another solution. We needed some company, some solution to help us with this, and that’s where we found vFunction. We saw the value of breaking up the application into smaller microservices. Once we found vFunction, it was a great way to actually visualize that complexity and be able to see exactly where we should break up the code and see all of those dependencies up front and be able to manage and staff that project appropriately. And it turned out to be quite a success. So in this transformation with vFunction, what we saw is what we tried before took us about a year. For the same type of project, this took about three months with vFunction. So when engaging with vFunction, we quickly realized they were really good at understanding code complexities. So things like identifying endpoints that really should be extracted are really exclusive compared to the rest of the application. It’s really awesome. You see that in one view, in one dashboard. They also get the code complexity very well in terms of, for example, dead code, like understanding code paths that are not even used that may add complexity to your codebase for engineers, but they’re not adding any value to customers.

0:02:31.3 Martin: So as customers have requests instead of us spending weeks trying to figure things out and deploy to this complex application, literally we saw cases where the teams could go in within hours and do that change that the customer ask, and customers are blown away when they see that. The goal of our project with vFunction was really to accelerate bringing value to the market. Our executive team was quite impressed with the speed at which we were able to modernize our application through this project. As a side benefit, we actually realized we saw much more than that. So what we saw with the teams is having them work in faster pipelines and quicker environments, the morale went up. They were more excited, proud of their product, and overall just the satisfaction of employees got much, much better. Our application modernization project was designed to help innovation and accelerate bringing value to customers. vFunction was really the key opportunity for us to work with a company that has that expertise of how to break up an application, move it to the cloud in order to have the teams deliver value faster to our customers.