December 7, 2015 Adam Bloom
Traditional entertainment and media companies have seen consumers move quickly beyond cable and desktop, and they are continually evolving their internet-centric user experiences to better engage consumers and produce advertising revenue.
Similar to how other companies have transformed themselves into digital leaders, NBCUniversal sought to standardize their application platforms and development processes across their companies, their culture, and their tooling to smooth the way for a greater velocity of app iterations. As a result, developers deploy daily builds without infrastructure hurdles, perform A/B testing within apps, and ensure more time is spent developing new user experiences versus fixing production issues. To improve their ability to compete, NBCUniversal embarked on a Cloud-Native journey with Pivotal and made education and change management a core part of their digital transformation.
The Technical And Cultural Challenges
As a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees, NBCUniversal’s digital operations include a significant number of independently operated media properties. Development teams typically live within these business groups and mostly operate with their own separate cultures and practices of application planning, design, development, and testing. Separate CIOs support each group, and shared IT infrastructure teams provide deployment and hosting services.
Each development team used some form of agile methods with regular sprints and 2-4 week iterations. However, there was significant friction between these developers and shared IT infrastructure teams. The culmination of each release had to pour into a waterfall model to be deployed in the shared hosting environment. This delay created tremendous lag time and frustration, making it impossible to do releases rapidly.
The Approach: A Cloud-Native Platform And Education
The infrastructure CTO and several business unit CIOs had previously seen an opportunity to provide standardized infrastructure and shared, open source application support. Looking forward, the business groups and CIOs were very interested in delivering end user functionality faster, having greater success with each deployment, and reducing risk. The CTO’s IT infrastructure teams wanted to support these needs with faster, simpler, and more automated application platforms but also deliver reliable scale and maintain a lower TCO through a shared enterprise-wide infrastructure.
Vaidy Kothandaraman, Director of Open Platform Technology, proposed the use of Cloud Foundry as a shared platform that would meet all of these needs. After an evaluation, Pivotal Cloud Foundry® (PCF) was chosen based on its additional capabilities, an integrated marketplace, and a best-in-class support team and ecosystem. However, the joint leadership teams also knew that the technology alone wouldn’t get them where they needed—there had to be a change in what developers believed and how work was done.
“This digital transformation is a critical step to help NBCUniversal better compete in the market. So, we made a strategic investment in training and change management to remove adoption barriers. It is one thing to try a new development technology, but it is another thing to lack the knowledge of how to use it effectively under tight timelines. To really shift our development culture, we also put in a program to internally evangelize our developers experience and results from using the platform,” said Kothandaraman.
Seeding The Organization For Change With Education
After choosing PCF in April, Pivotal helped implement the Cloud-Native platform, which was live by the end of September. In parallel, the Open Platform Technology team began presenting the new approaches and tooling to the CIO organizations and business groups. They found that the most vocalized, pressing needs were already backed with a strong desire for microservices support.
As the platform went live, a group of twelve lead developers was chosen from across the business groups and brought together for a 3-day, instructor-led training class delivered by Pivotal Academy. This onsite class covered underlying DevOps platform principles, architecture, and deployment processes with detailed, hands-on labs. After training, many developers were able to immediately start deploying code. Some tried using the platform before training and wished they participated in the training class first to help accelerate their learning curve. Since the training, no one has reached out to Kothandaraman’s team with issues.
After several early successes without critical challenges, Kothandaraman has continued to do roadshow demonstrations for more internal organizations. He invests time promoting the outcomes, identifying new projects to support, ensuring training is taken, and helping their internal development community evolve. Kothandaraman shared his experience to date, “With a seamless deployment, effective training, and extra support, we are more likely to get successful results. Then, it is much easier to motivate other groups to come on board.”
The Results To Date
Today, five different business teams are using PCF. Importantly, early developers experienced the value of training, felt that the instructor and materials were outstanding, and were able to start using PCF to automate builds and deployments without major hurdles. Like many other customers, NBCUniversal now has first hand experience with faster, agile iterations. They are using the platform for various language runtimes, messaging, and data stores. They have an ability to scale across the organization on a lower TCO trajectory. Most importantly, this Cloud-Native journey is putting them better position to compete for consumer attention.
Learn More:
View all Pivotal Training courses and certifications
Meet one of our trainers, Mark Secrist in a Pivotal People interview
December 7, 2015 Adam Bloom
Traditional entertainment and media companies have seen consumers move quickly beyond cable and desktop, and they are continually evolving their internet-centric user experiences to better engage consumers and produce advertising revenue.
Similar to how other companies have transformed themselves into digital leaders, NBCUniversal sought to standardize their application platforms and development processes across their companies, their culture, and their tooling to smooth the way for a greater velocity of app iterations. As a result, developers deploy daily builds without infrastructure hurdles, perform A/B testing within apps, and ensure more time is spent developing new user experiences versus fixing production issues. To improve their ability to compete, NBCUniversal embarked on a Cloud-Native journey with Pivotal and made education and change management a core part of their digital transformation.
The Technical And Cultural Challenges
As a multi-billion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees, NBCUniversal’s digital operations include a significant number of independently operated media properties. Development teams typically live within these business groups and mostly operate with their own separate cultures and practices of application planning, design, development, and testing. Separate CIOs support each group, and shared IT infrastructure teams provide deployment and hosting services.
Each development team used some form of agile methods with regular sprints and 2-4 week iterations. However, there was significant friction between these developers and shared IT infrastructure teams. The culmination of each release had to pour into a waterfall model to be deployed in the shared hosting environment. This delay created tremendous lag time and frustration, making it impossible to do releases rapidly.
The Approach: A Cloud-Native Platform And Education
The infrastructure CTO and several business unit CIOs had previously seen an opportunity to provide standardized infrastructure and shared, open source application support. Looking forward, the business groups and CIOs were very interested in delivering end user functionality faster, having greater success with each deployment, and reducing risk. The CTO’s IT infrastructure teams wanted to support these needs with faster, simpler, and more automated application platforms but also deliver reliable scale and maintain a lower TCO through a shared enterprise-wide infrastructure.
translate：
翻译：
2015年12月7日亚当·布鲁姆
传统的娱乐和媒体公司已经看到消费者迅速超越有线电视和台式机，他们不断发展以互联网为中心的用户体验，以更好地吸引消费者并产生广告收入。
与其他公司将自己转变为数字领导者的方式类似，NBCUniversal试图在其公司、文化和工具之间实现其应用程序平台和开发流程的标准化，以便为更快速的应用程序迭代铺平道路。因此，开发人员可以在没有基础设施障碍的情况下部署每日构建，在应用程序中执行a/B测试，并确保在开发新用户体验上花费更多时间，而不是解决生产问题。为了提高他们的竞争能力，NBCUniversal与Pivotal一起踏上了云计算之旅，并将教育和变革管理作为其数字化转型的核心部分。
技术和文化挑战
作为一家拥有数万名员工、价值数十亿美元的公司，NBCUniversal的数字业务包括大量独立运营的媒体资产。开发团队通常生活在这些业务组中，并且主要使用他们自己的独立文化和应用程序规划、设计、开发和测试实践进行操作。独立的CIO支持每个组，共享的IT基础架构团队提供部署和托管服务。
每个开发团队都使用某种形式的敏捷方法，定期进行sprint和2-4周的迭代。然而，这些开发人员和共享IT基础设施团队之间存在着巨大的摩擦。每个版本的高潮都必须注入一个瀑布模型，以部署在共享托管环境中。这种延迟造成了巨大的延迟时间和挫败感，使它不可能快速释放。
方法：一个云本地平台和教育
基础设施首席技术官和几个业务部门首席信息官以前曾看到过提供标准化基础设施和共享的开源应用程序支持的机会。展望未来，各业务组和首席信息官对更快地交付最终用户功能、在每次部署中获得更大的成功以及降低风险非常感兴趣。CTO的IT基础架构团队希望通过更快、更简单、更自动化的应用程序平台来支持这些需求，同时通过共享的企业范围基础架构提供可靠的规模并保持较低的TCO。
开放平台技术主管Vaidy Kothandaraman提议使用Cloud Foundry作为一个共享平台来满足所有这些需求。经过评估，Pivotal Cloud Foundry®（PCF）是根据其附加功能、集成市场以及一流的支持团队和生态系统而选择的。然而，联合领导团队也知道，单靠技术无法让他们达到所需的位置，开发人员的信念和工作方式必须有所改变。
“这一数字化转型是帮助NBCUniversal更好地在市场上竞争的关键一步。因此，我们在培训和变革管理方面进行了战略投资，以消除采用障碍。尝试一种新的开发技术是一回事，但缺乏在紧迫的时间线下如何有效地使用它的知识则是另一回事。为了真正改变我们的开发文化，我们还加入了一个程序，在内部传播我们的开发人员使用该平台的经验和结果，”Kothandaraman说。
以教育推动变革组织
在4月份选择了PCF之后，Pivotal帮助实现了在9月底上线的云原生平台。同时，开放平台技术团队开始向CIO组织和业务组展示新的方法和工具。他们发现，最迫切的需求已经得到了对微服务支持的强烈渴望的支持。
随着该平台的上线，从各商业集团中选出了一个由12名首席开发人员组成的小组，并由Pivotal Academy举办为期3天的讲师指导培训班。这门现场课程涵盖了底层的DevOps平台原则、体系结构和部署过程，并提供了详细的实践性实验室。经过培训，许多开发人员能够立即开始部署代码。有些人在训练前尝试使用这个平台，希望他们先参加训练班，以帮助加速他们的学习曲线。自训练以来，没有人与科丹达曼的球队取得联系。
在几次没有重大挑战的早期成功之后，Kothandaraman继续为更多的内部组织进行路演演示。他投入时间促进成果，确定新的支持项目，确保培训，并帮助他们的内部发展社区发展。Kothandaraman分享了他迄今为止的经验，“通过无缝部署、有效培训和额外支持，我们更有可能取得成功。这样，就更容易激励其他团体加入。”
迄今为止的结果
今天，五个不同的业务团队正在使用PCF。重要的是，早期的开发人员体验到了培训的价值，觉得讲师和材料都很优秀，并且能够开始使用PCF来自动化构建和部署，而不存在重大障碍。与许多其他客户一样，NBCUniversal现在拥有更快、敏捷迭代的第一手经验。他们正在使用该平台进行各种语言运行时、消息传递和数据存储。他们有能力在较低的总体拥有成本轨道上跨整个组织进行扩展。最重要的是，这次云计算之旅让他们在争夺消费者注意力方面处于更好的位置。
了解更多：
查看所有关键培训课程和证书
会见我们的一位培训师，马克·塞克里斯特在关键人物访谈中
2015年12月7日亚当·布鲁姆
传统的娱乐和媒体公司已经看到消费者迅速超越有线电视和台式机，他们不断发展以互联网为中心的用户体验，以更好地吸引消费者并产生广告收入。
与其他公司将自己转变为数字领导者的方式类似，NBCUniversal试图在其公司、文化和工具之间实现其应用程序平台和开发流程的标准化，以便为更快速的应用程序迭代铺平道路。因此，开发人员可以在没有基础设施障碍的情况下部署每日构建，在应用程序中执行a/B测试，并确保在开发新用户体验上花费更多时间，而不是解决生产问题。为了提高他们的竞争能力，NBCUniversal与Pivotal一起踏上了云计算之旅，并将教育和变革管理作为其数字化转型的核心部分。
技术和文化挑战
作为一家拥有数万名员工、价值数十亿美元的公司，NBCUniversal的数字业务包括大量独立运营的媒体资产。开发团队通常生活在这些业务组中，并且主要使用他们自己的独立文化和应用程序规划、设计、开发和测试实践进行操作。独立的CIO支持每个组，共享的IT基础架构团队提供部署和托管服务。
每个开发团队都使用某种形式的敏捷方法，定期进行sprint和2-4周的迭代。然而，这些开发人员和共享IT基础设施团队之间存在着巨大的摩擦。每个版本的高潮都必须注入一个瀑布模型，以部署在共享托管环境中。这种延迟造成了巨大的延迟时间和挫败感，使它不可能快速释放。
方法：一个云本地平台和教育
基础设施首席技术官和几个业务部门首席信息官以前曾看到过提供标准化基础设施和共享的开源应用程序支持的机会。展望未来，各业务组和首席信息官对更快地交付最终用户功能、在每次部署中获得更大的成功以及降低风险非常感兴趣。CTO的IT基础架构团队希望通过更快、更简单、更自动化的应用程序平台来支持这些需求，同时通过共享的企业范围基础架构提供可靠的规模并保持较低的TCO。
