Rabobank

Putting cloud first

Once upon a time, banking revolved around branch offices, face-to-face interactions, and paper-based processes. But times have changed, and Rabobank’s business has become increasingly digital, growing to encompass a large application environment. Today, the bank’s dedicated development team is responsible for an ever-growing collection of both internal and external systems, spanning everything from mobile banking and insurance apps to web services and APIs.

For Rabobank, it’s vital to ensure high performance and reliability for these applications, against a backdrop of ever-changing demand. Testing plays a key part in that strategy, helping developers identify and resolve application defects before releasing code into production. As requirements rose, Rabobank made an important addition to its development landscape: LoadRunner Enterprise, a collaborative performance testing platform.

Deployed as an on-premises solution in the Netherlands, LoadRunner Enterprise helped the bank take much-needed steps to streamline and accelerate application testing across its global business. A few years into that successful deployment, Rabobank introduced a far-reaching cloud-first strategy, aiming to take its entire business into the cloud—application testing included.

The migration went very smoothly, and every step felt like a natural progression. Credit for that must go to the Micro Focus (now OpenText) team, who took a lot of time to assess our environment and plan out all the steps carefully.

Moving in a new direction

This broader strategic shift prompted the bank to find a cloud-based alternative for its LoadRunner Enterprise platform.

Arjan Bos, Product Owner at Rabobank, recalls: “We took the opportunity to look at what else was out there on the market, but it quickly became clear that Micro Focus (now OpenText) was still the best option for Rabobank. Switching to a competing product would have meant changing our scripts and taking our core team and all supported teams through a whole new learning curve. We’ve built up a lot of experience with LoadRunner Enterprise and we really like using the platform, which drove our business case to stay with Micro Focus (now OpenText).”

Rabobank decided to make the switch to LoadRunner Enterprise on SaaS. Delivered as a flexible service from OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), the solution provides a fully managed environment of LoadRunner Enterprise software—the ideal fit for the bank’s cloud-first ambitions.

Working closely with OpenText (formerly Micro Focus), Rabobank planned a like-for-like migration from its on-premises environment to the cloud. This included reviewing the bank’s existing testing projects and the sizes of their databases and sorting them into batches—15 in total—for migration. The team migrated to the new cloud environment in phases, planning batch migrations over weekends to minimize disruption to the business. In total, Rabobank migrated 4TB of project data from its on-premises server to LoadRunner Enterprise SaaS.

“The migration went very smoothly, and every step felt like a natural progression,” notes Bos. “Credit for that must go to the Micro Focus (now OpenText) team, who took the time to assess our environment and plan out all the steps carefully. We migrated the entire LoadRunner Enterprise repository in six months, and, after a few minor tweaks, the new cloud platform worked perfectly from the moment we started using it.”

Greater flexibility for diverse testing needs

Today, LoadRunner Enterprise SaaS is used by hundreds of users at Rabobank locations across them Netherlands and around the world— including a large team in Australia. Testers and developers use the platform to manage application performance testing for around 180 projects and growing.

Thanks to the switch to the SaaS version of LoadRunner Enterprise, Rabobank can quickly and elastically scale up its test landscapes to meet the varying demands of its many business applications. This has brought a new level of flexibility to application testing, all while reducing the overhead of managing a dedicated physical infrastructure. For Rabobank, a highly visible benefit has been the end of regular twice-yearly upgrades of the LoadRunner Enterprise software. The time and effort saved by the team can be reinvested in other more important activities, while the SaaS mode means that Rabobank automatically has access to the latest version of the OpenText (formerly Micro Focus) software. And since this work was typically previously done over the weekend to avoid business disruption, moving to SaaS mode means a better work-life balance for IT staff at Rabobank.

Bos confirms: “Not having to manage LoadRunner Enterprise for ourselves certainly removes an administrative burden, as well as the need to maintain a hardware landscape with sufficient spare capacity to manage peaks in demand. From my perspective, the best thing about LoadRunner Enterprise SaaS is the added flexibility it gives us. If requirements around our applications change, we can rapidly adjust our testing footprint up or down. When we need to scale the environment, all we have to do is call or email the Micro Focus (now OpenText) team, and they’ll typically add new licenses for us within two days. Likewise, we can scale back down once the peak has passed, so it’s also a very economical option.”

From my perspective, the best thing about LoadRunner Enterprise SaaS is the added flexibility it gives us. If requirements around our applications change, we can rapidly adjust our testing footprint up or down.