Capgemini Smart Foundry End-to-end DevTest Environment Management Solution

Capgemini SE announced the Smart Foundry, its end-to-end DevTest ⁽¹⁾ environment management solution, powered by the Nutanix, Inc.‘s Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure and Plutora‘s Value Stream Management (VSM) platforms.

Smart Foundry integrates with Capgemini’s SmartQA platform to deliver multi-premise, cloud-agnostic, and domain-centric testing solutions for application deployment. The solution can deliver DevTest environments across on-premise, private and public clouds based on budgetary and reuse needs, and SLAs. Smart Foundry can accelerate time-to-market by as much as 60%, lower costs by up to 40%, and reduce environment-related defects and provisioning delays by as much as 80%. The solution is initially tailored to meet the needs of financial services organizations and will be rolled out to other industry sectors in the future.

According to Capgemini’s World Quality Report 2019-20, the widespread adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies, the need for quality assurance (QA) orchestration and its impact on enterprises, is higher than ever. The report concludes that there is a need for an integrated and intelligent ecosystem for DevOps ⁽²⁾ and QA to realize business benefits.

This solution incorporates cutting-edge technologies and practices such as service virtualization, container management, interactive configuration management databases, chaos engineering, observability, and auto-healing. Smart Foundry was designed as a reference architecture that integrates with SmartQA platform and a wide range of test data, automation, and reporting tools leveraging ML and AI capabilities.

“Smart Foundry is designed to bring in intelligent integrations, more automation and self-provisioning capabilities to expedite ‘efficient route to live’ along with ‘effective QA’ in the software development lifecycle,” said Ajay Walgude, VP, financial services, Capgemini. “To do this, it is essential that a highly automated and intelligent test environment and test data management platform is implemented. We teamed with Nutanix and Plutora, who deliver next-gen technology, to achieve these goals. This is not just an engineering solution. Capgemini has leveraged its deep domain experience across sectors to build industry-specific environment solutions to address functional and non-functional testing requirements using Smart Foundry.“

To provide a cloud-like experience, the company chose the Nutanix Hybrid Cloud infrastructure platform to power, secure, and orchestrate DevTest environments. Additional Nutanix solution components that are incorporated into the solution include: Nutanix Calm which simplifies and automates deploying DevTest environments with detailed blueprints; Karbon for Kubernetes management; unified storage to support the block, file, and object data needs of diverse applications; and Beam which provides cost management capabilities.

“Many organizations struggle with maintaining visibility and managing overheads for their DevTest environments, due to over-reliance on manual processes and the lack of standardization,” said Manoj Gupta, VP, systems integration, Nutanix. “Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, built on industry-leading Nutanix hybrid cloud infrastructure platform software, gives organizations a standardized, high-performing, continuous testing solution with measurable benefits such as shorter development lifecycle, improved software quality, high developer productivity, and significant cost savings.“

“Software drives innovation and it has always been our intention to help organizations to shape their business through amazing software and stay competitive through continuous innovation,” said Jeff Keyes, VP, product, Plutora. “By bringing Plutora’s Value Stream Management (VSM) and environment provisioning capabilities to Capgemini’s Smart Foundry, we believe the resulting visibility provides for a holistic environment management solution. To compete in today’s constantly changing landscape, it’s vital for organizations to focus on driving successful outcomes and increasing business value, and the importance of VSM in that pursuit is essential when building a holistic environment management solution like Smart Foundry.“

Plutora offers a pre-production environment management solution that provides internal and external environment teams a central place to collaborate on and view environment bookings and configurations. As part of Smart Foundry, it gives users the ability to select from a list of available Calm Blueprints and the system orchestrates the build of the appropriate environment, automatically. It also allows users to create a Change Request that will orchestrate the provisioning of synthesized test data.

⁽¹⁾ DevTest environment is a non-production environment used for development and testing needs.
⁽²⁾ DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and IT operations.