Executive summary
Three years ago, the management of Intesa Sanpaolo adopted a modern IT vision to evolve both infrastructure and applications. Although microservices were still a cutting-edge technology they would form the basis for building the applications we now label as cloud native. This decision was designed to initiate the modernization of applications and services to address modern IT challenges, achieving three objectives: cost control, better stability and scalability, and greater customer satisfaction.
In this case study we will describe the challenges, how Intesa Sanpaolo decided to convert one of its main business-critical applications from a monolithic application to microservices, and how a platform called vFunction helped to turn this challenge into a success.
The challenge
Microservice & PaaS transformation to modernize legacy applications
Three years ago, the management of Intesa Sanpaolo adopted an IT modernization vision that evolved both infrastructure and applications. Although microservices were still a cutting-edge technology at that point, they would form the basis for building the applications we now label as cloud native. This decision initiated the modernization of applications and services to address their modern IT challenges, achieving three objectives: cost control, better stability and scalability, and greater customer satisfaction.
The Solution
vFunction accelerates microservice transformation
Using vFunction, Intesa transformed FVCB0, one of the FVCB monoliths, into a microservices application, delivering the three essential business functions provided by the application monolith: import, download and flow management. It was a collaborative effort between Intesa Sanpaolo and vFunction with Intesa Sanpaolo teams to accelerate microservice transformation, providing extensive feedback and feature requests to vFunction. Before refactoring, FVCB0 was based on Java, and WebLogic. Following the refactoring, the application is now based on JBoss and OpenShift and compatibility tests are underway for portability to the public cloud.
Scaling modernization across the organization: factory model
After deploying vFunction on a dozen applications, the Intesa Sanpaolo team needed a way to manage the entire modernization process at scale. They wanted to understand the modernization stage for each application and manage vFunction across multiple applications at the same time. This included starting and stopping the learning phase, reviewing the potential extracted services from each application from a central location, prioritizing which applications to refactor first, and enabling all of these actions with minimal involvement from the development and testing teams. vFunction responded to the challenge by releasing its production agent which could be deployed automatically on hundreds or thousands of applications in production, as well as its factory dashboard and management console. These latter capabilities allow vFunction to support the modernization journey of hundreds of applications while providing visibility and control to the project team.
The results
3x Increase in Deployment Frequency, Lower Costs
vFunction has enabled Intesa Sanpaolo to accelerate their modernization journey. The major improvements that refactoring brought them can be classified into three categories: cost, application management, and customer satisfaction. From the point of view of costs, the reduction of WebLogic licenses and over four months of savings per application – which translates to both time and manpower savings. This significantly reduced development/test cycles and manual deployment activities, translating to substantial cost improvements. A 3x increase in release frequency, combined with the principles of automated deployment to Intesa Sanpaolo’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) platform, has made infrastructure management a much leaner experience. Finally, from the customer’s point of view, refactoring has allowed for increased stability, better scalability and reduced downtime for updates, increasing customer satisfaction.
