Market Leader in Voluntary Insurance Benefits Brings DevOps Automation to the Database; Delivers Innovation to Customers Faster
AUSTIN, Texas – Sept. 20, 2018 – Datical, the leading provider of database release automation solutions, today announced that Colonial Life, a market leader in financial protection benefits for the workplace, has selected Datical as its partner to automate the deployment of database changes and accelerate DevOps.
For nearly 80 years, Colonial Life (a subsidiary of Unum Group) has been an industry-leading voluntary benefits provider in the U.S. Colonial Life serves more than 4 million people at more than 90,000 companies and organizations with a comprehensive package of voluntary benefits including disability, life, accident, dental, critical illness, cancer and hospitalization insurance.
In today’s increasingly competitive insurance market, providers must remain innovative with fast, frequent benefits updates and new application releases to deliver better customer experiences. To achieve this, organizations such as Colonial Life have turned to Agile and DevOps practices to deliver software innovation to market quickly and with high quality. However, despite investments in new technologies to automate the build, test and deployment of application code, organizations can struggle with incorporating the necessary speed and quality of database code changes into their software delivery process. This is because Agile and DevOps improvements have not been applied to the entire software development stack.
“Our applications are very data driven, so it’s extremely important that our database code changes consistently move along the software delivery path with our application code changes,” said Colette Casey, technical architect at Colonial Life. “Prior to Datical, we had a very cumbersome process for reviewing, validating and deploying database changes. Unlike the automated process for deploying application code, this process was manual, and it was not uncommon that steps were missed or left incomplete. The database and application deployment processes were completely disconnected.”
Colonial Life transformed its software delivery process and chose Datical to bring DevOps to the entire software stack, expanding beyond application code to include the critical role that data and the database play in modern software delivery. Colonial Life moved from a manual waterfall software delivery model to a modern, automated, faster continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.
Datical is changing the way businesses build software to deliver better customer experiences faster. Datical’s solution is designed to break the application release logjam created by today’s manual database deployment processes. Datical improves productivity and performance, allowing development, test and database administrator (DBA) staff to focus on more important projects and initiatives – overcoming the large hurdle of bringing data into the continuous delivery process.
“Datical provides the ability, flexibility, speed and ease to make sure that our database code moves with application our code. If you want to deliver software innovation to market faster and more often, I can’t stress enough how important it is to include the database when automating the software delivery process,” Casey said. “The first release we took to production with Datical had about 600 database change scripts. In the past, this would have taken the better part of a day to deploy. With Datical, it was done in about one hour.”
Resources
- Datical website: https://www.datical.com
- Blog: https://www.datical.com/blog
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Datical
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/datical
- Demo: https://www.datical.com/demo/
About Colonial Life
Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company is a market leader in providing financial protection benefits through the workplace, including disability, life, accident, dental, cancer, critical illness and hospital confinement indemnity insurance. The company’s benefit services and education, innovative enrollment technology and personal service support more than 90,000 businesses and organizations, representing more than 4 million of America’s workers and their families. For more information visit www.coloniallife.com.
About Datical, Inc. Datical’s mission is to transform the way businesses build software so they can deliver better customer experiences faster. Datical solutions deliver the database release automation capabilities technology executives need to get the most out of their Agile, Cloud, DevOps and Continuous Delivery investments. With Datical database release automation organizations can shorten the time it takes to bring applications to market while eliminating the security vulnerabilities, costly errors, data loss and downtime often associated with current database deployment methods. For more information, visit www.datical.com, call 737-402-7187 or connect via @datical.
