Global Professional Services Company

Smooth migration to ALM/quality center SaaS model with partner SaaS program

It was at this time that OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) and Global Professional Services Company entered a Partner SaaS agreement. This program provides project delivery teams with a quick and easy way to demonstrate time to value, while minimizing costs through a services-oriented consumption-based pricing model. A pay per use model gives flexibility in client engagements, and this is exactly what was required in this particular scenario. The dedicated OpenText (formerly Micro Focus)-hosted SaaS environment removes client responsibility for implementation, maintenance, support, and security of ALM/Quality Center and ensures constant version currency. A OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Partner Success Manager is on hand at any time to support the process.

Global Professional Services Company and OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) Professional Services worked closely to ensure that all data was migrated effectively. In this case, a dry run proved an excellent way to ensure a smooth migration. The Partner SaaS model was implemented, and the Global Professional Services Company team then fully supported the client with a major test cycle, involving over 1,000 tests executed during a four-month period. A mix of business users, development teams, and technical team members made up some 700 ALM/Quality Center users involved in the testing effort. “We had users in different time zones involved in UAT testing, as well as system integration tests,” comments Senior Project Manager.

The development teams follow a waterfall methodology which means there are huge fluctuations in testing requirements, with sometimes months in between testing cycles. The Partner SaaS flexible usage model for ALM/Quality Center is just perfect for this. We easily scale up and down as required.

ALM/Quality Center is used for test planning, test execution, and defect management. The Global Professional Services Company team spent time to analyze, deduplicate, and prioritize the 10,000 defects that were in backlog due to lack of client resources. Working through these became a key part of the design and build cycle and, slowly but surely, all defects were addressed in a more streamlined process which was designed to be fully SOX-compliant.

Flexible model delivers cost savings and improved productivity

When Global Professional Services Company and the client identified a need for performance testing to ensure that the new ERP solution would scale up as required, the value of the flexible Partner SaaS model was clear once again, as Senior Project Manager describes:

We decided on a short-term subscription of LoadRunner Cloud to easily plan, run, and scale performance tests without the need to deploy and manage the infrastructure for it. As this is all under the same Partner SaaS umbrella, LoadRunner Cloud was easily obtained and leveraged as an ad-hoc solution which worked great.

Senior Project Manager concludes: “The Partner SaaS program was designed for exactly this client scenario. During a major ERP upgrade project, the client did not have the resources to maintain and support their on-premises instance of ALM/Quality Center but with testing requirements at a crucial stage they also could not afford to lose any of their test data. We collaborated with Micro Focus (now OpenText) to move to a SaaS implementation, removing the need for our client to dedicate any resources to infrastructure requirements. The SaaS model ensured much more streamlined and transparent licensing which created cost savings and boosted productivity. Our client has successfully launched their new ERP solution and is delighted with the Global Professional Services Company and Micro Focus (now OpenText) support.”