The client, a global financial investment services firm based in the United States, manages more than a trillion dollars in assets, employs thousands of financial professionals and maintains offices in several world economic hubs.

The company’s expansive internal IT organization, which operates a large VMware environment and leverages a team of 400 to 500 developers, is tasked with building mission-critical applications quickly to deliver essential business services such as trading, reporting and handling large amounts of capital.

Internal IT infrastructure support for the client’s web developers was handled by a very small team that struggled to keep up with constant requests. The tremendous volume of requests, combined with limited resources to handle them, prevented the team from delivering an efficient development process to the business.

The firm set out to find a multi-cloud solution that would give their development staff a self-service portal to more efficiently deliver applications to the business.

Our innovative cloud automation solution leveraged OpenStack as a cloud management platform for the investment firm, built on top of an architecture that included best-of-breed technology for compute, storage, load balancing and configuration management.

The self-service portal was designed to provide developers with standard virtual infrastructure stacks to support their application and enable delivery within minutes instead of weeks. The drag-and-drop portal includes templates for commonly-used configurations and allows for more-advanced customization when needed.

The platform can leverage a combination of on-premise infrastructure and cloud-based tools and provides for easy dual-deployment within a public cloud for branch offices without a dedicated local data center.