As increasingly more enterprises investigate how to begin their DevOps transformations, many of them are finding mobile development (mobile dev) a perfect test bed for instituting continuous delivery practices. While speed-of-delivery has become top-of-mind for most IT applications today, it is paramount for success in the world of mobile apps.
“The rapid pace of how quickly OSes are evolving, as are the number of different devices and form factors are all a driving force across a lot of different disciplines and businesses,” says Stephanie Trunzo, chief operating officer for mobile design and development firm Pointsource. “I would say that one of the driving forces to mobile is time-to-value and acceleration to market. It’s kind of an incubator for changing processes overall—we’ve seen that again and again.”
In her role, Trunzo has worked with companies to rapidly develop new mobile capabilities using DevOps and Agile principles. In many cases, it goes against the grain of their traditional development and operations modus operandi, but they’re willing to make exceptions for these mobile projects that require faster lifecycles due to the business drivers.
“When they see it’s working and we gain some credibility, then it’s like ‘Why aren’t we doing everything this way?'” says Trunzo, who next week at IBM InterConnect will present an example of how DevOps can help enterprises quickly scale their mobile development efforts.
Together with Pointsource client, Primerica, Trunzo and her team were able to help the insurance and financial planning giant to push a key business mobile app to a workforce of 95,000 insurance representatives in just five months from concept to delivery. Tom Swift, executive vice president of field technology for Primerica will join Trunzo in presenting the case study at the show.
“Traditionally, in-house development projects could see up to an 18-month release cycle, but Primerica knew they needed to accelerate to shift the business to include the mobile focus,” Trunzo explained. However, acceleration is exactly what the business needed in order to retain sales talent.
According to Trunzo, Primerica found that it needed a mobile app to help educate and engage with competitive representatives and was able to deliver one that gamified sales objectives. In addition, it offered very practical tools for representatives to present pertinent information to clients when visiting at their kitchen tables.
“It’s been a great experience,” she says. “Their numbers and results are fantastic and that’s a story we’re going to be telling on stage at InterConnect.”