As the industry leader in property software solutions across Australia and New Zealand, Rockend provides innovative, reliable and easy-to-use software for property management, strata management software, document management and real estate trust accounting.
But while Rockend's cloud-based property management software, PropertyTree, has become the most widely used software among property managers across Australia and New Zealand, its legacy environment had become a significant cost burden.
So Rockend selected Vibrato to uplift its entire cloud environment and deployment processes to a more modern and future-ready architecture.
Vibrato took home the coveted Digital Transformation award at last year's CRN Impact Awards for a major project on Amazon Web Services, and is this year vying for the category with an Azure project.
The solution for Rockend was identified as a shift to a platform-as-a-service offering in the Microsoft Azure stack, along with maturing the operational monitoring capabilities of the platform.
However, Rockend's existing deployments complexities required a large amount of innovative thinking to enable costs savings on the existing platform.
Vibrato and Rockend partnered to perform a detailed continuous delivery maturity model assessment.
The purpose of this assessment was to review the entire current state architecture of both Rockend's production and development Azure environments, as well as the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD) processes that underpin them.
Vibrato also met with the Rockend’s CTO and its head of engineering weekly to ensure alignment in delivery priorities.
As the business priorities changed, Vibrato ensured that delivery was closely aligned to priorities to maximise return on investment.
Vibrato was also active members of Rockend's enterprise architecture board, which met weekly. This participation ensured that the technical direction of our solutions was in alignment with the technical direction of the rest of the engineering organisation.
Due to the pressing cost burden on the business, the timelines for this project were expedited as much as possible. The work was delivered in an agile Kanban fashion, with regular meetings with stakeholders and engineering teams.
During the course of the project, Vibrato pair-programmed delivery with a Rockend engineer as much as possible to ensure handover and transition to business-as-usual at the end of the project was as smooth as possible, and also to ensure that key information, learnings and knowledge was retained by the Rockend team.
“Vibrato have worked closely with our in-house engineering team for the past 12 months to achieve a full DevOps culture shift, implement a mature CICD pipeline, roll-out 100 percent IAC, and move us to a 100 percent PaaS business,” said Rockend’s CTO, Andrew Turner.
“We have all enjoyed working with the Vibrato team and are excited by how this work has provided us with the ability to react quickly to changing market conditions and get high quality products out to market faster.
"The Vibrato team have been a pleasure to have on-site and to work with and we are now kicking off a long-term engagement which will see Vibrato work with us to continue the build-out of a more automated, mature ‘Future Ready Platform’ ready for a global customer base.”
By leveraging the capabilities of the Microsoft Azure platform, Rockend met its business objectives while controlling access to resources, preventing resource sprawl and achieve tight controls over costs.
Vibrato's contribution has realised a reduced time to market for new features, increased measurement of key metrics, and upskilling of the Rockend team in critical DevOps best practices, which has resulted in a revolutionary cultural shift towards innovation and new product engineering.
Reduced operational effort allowing an increased focus on building new products and features, whilst proactive incident identification and alerting means issues are identified and resolved much sooner. And increased feature delivery throughput by provides Rockend with the ability to provision test environments on demand.
And thanks to the visibility afforded by Power BI, Rockend was able to instantly perceive the cost benefits brought about by Vibrato's solution. Rockend is now planning to deploy the solution across additional environments, which is anticipated to result in even greater cost savings.
Vibrato is a finalist in the 'Digital Transformation' category in the 2018 CRN Impact Awards. For a list of all finalists and further details on the awards, please head to the CRN Impact Awards hub. The awards take place during the CRN Pipeline conference. You can get more information and purchase tickets here.
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