Spark stands at the forefront of New Zealand’s telecommunications and digital services sector, offering communication, cloud, and IT services to both consumer and business markets. Spark serves millions of New Zealanders with a vision that focuses on empowering customers and industries with advanced technological solutions that drive connectivity and growth.
The Driving Force
Spark’s non-production environment (NPE) team manages several large static environments used for testing, integration and user acceptance testing (UAT). The team faced several challenges within these environments including:
- Environments are shared across multiple development teams leading to contention and complex scheduling with teams required to book a slot for an environment.
- Several data issues with infrequent production data refreshes leading to test data loss. The data refresh process could cause days of lost productivity for development teams.
- Maintaining static environments incurs substantial operational costs.
- Limited flexibility in environment configuration hindered rapid testing and deployment.
Development teams needed a dynamic solution that would allow them to create tailored environments on demand to streamline testing and push software into production more efficiently and cost effectively. Recognising this, Spark sought ClearPoint’s expertise to turn their Environment-as-a-Service concept into a reality.
As Deb Costello, Domain Chapter Lead at Spark, explains: "We were looking for a reliable and innovative partner to help us create and implement our Environment as a Service vision. We found that partner in ClearPoint. They were involved from the start, providing us with strategic guidance, technical expertise, and engineering leadership."
Our Approach
ClearPoint worked closely with Spark to realise the Environment-as-a-service (EaaS) idea into an operational solution. ClearPoint employed a comprehensive, multi-phase strategy to develop Spark's EaaS solution including:
Discovery and Architecture
- Conducted thorough requirements analysis with key stakeholders
- Developed detailed solution architecture aligned with Spark's existing systems
- Created a roadmap for incremental delivery and validation
Technical Implementation
- Evaluated and implemented Parasoft Virtualize for service virtualisation
- Established virtual versions of complex systems including Seibel
- Created virtualised third-party services for Spark integration and technology partners
- Developed a robust repository and deployment pipeline for virtual assets
Data Management
- Provided thought leadership on data masking best practices, architecture and improvements to current state including a successful proof of concept of a new data masking solution
- Designed efficient data refresh processes
- Created automated data management workflows
Marcus Reynolds, Environment Manager at Spark remarked that "the quality of the team is impressive". This sentiment reflected ClearPoint's commitment to delivering excellence throughout the engagement, as we maintained constant communication and collaboration with Spark's teams to ensure the solution met their evolving needs.
The Solution
The Environment-as-a-Service platform developed by ClearPoint with Spark represents a significant advancement in Spark's development and testing capabilities. At its core, the solution allows developers or testers to create an ephemeral environment on demand by choosing components from a menu in a web portal. Users can select from a comprehensive menu of components, including code repositories, data sets, and virtualised services such as APIs, allowing them to create precisely the environment they need for their specific testing requirements. When a team member requests an environment, the system automatically provisions the selected components, configures the necessary integrations, and establishes the required connections between services. This automated approach eliminates the manual configuration steps that previously caused significant delays in the testing process.
The selection of Parasoft Virtualize for service virtualisation enabled virtual versions of complex systems, such as Seibel and 3rd party services, to be accessed based on recorded network traffic or service definitions. This is similar to mocking of services in a test environment and provides consistent and predictable behaviour for testing scenarios.
ClearPoint established a repository and deployment pipeline for Parasoft’s virtual assets and assisted in introducing a reliable data masking solution. This hands-on engineering and technical leadership laid the foundation for a user-centric EaaS platform.
The Outcome
Through thought leadership and hands-on engineering, ClearPoint successfully led the way in standing up Spark’s EaaS environment, setting a precedent by virtualising Seibel - a feat not previously achieved. With the new system in place, Spark’s development teams gained the ability to create ephemeral environments on demand through building a repository and deployment pipeline for Parasoft virtual assets and assisting with a data masking solution. These significantly reduced bottlenecks thus improving collaboration.
ClearPoint has been more than a vendor, they have been a trusted advisor and a valued collaborator. We are very happy with their service and we highly recommend them to anyone who needs Environment as a Service solutions.”
- Deb Costello, Domain Chapter Lead, Spark
The project laid the groundwork to deliver anticipated tangible cost savings, reduce data refresh time and enhance productivity by minimising the reliance on expensive static environments. The success of this 6 month project has established a foundation for continued innovation in Spark's development and testing processes. The EaaS platform provides scalability for future growth while maintaining operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Conclusion
ClearPoint’s partnership with Spark illustrates the value of blending technical expertise with customer-centric solutions to solve complex IT challenges. Through collaborative effort and innovative engineering, Spark now benefits from a scalable, future-proof environment that drives operational excellence.
ClearPoint is a trusted partner that delivers tailored IT solutions like the Environment-as-a-Service platform for Spark. Contact us today to explore how we can support your next customised technology project.
