Clear Measure, Inc.

biBERK, a national corporate insurance provider, inherited a codebase that was not suited to its needs. They wanted the software to be more “direct-to-consumer”. The code base was not a cloud-native architecture, so there were scaling concerns.

In addition, the team was struggling in their transition to agile methodology and processes. biBERK needed to get an outside opinion about some of the vendors that they were working with to make sure that all risks were identified with a potential software upgrade. They also needed assistance with their goals and objectives and training in agile tools. 

biBERK invited Clear Measure as a trusted partner to help oversee a relationship with a new vendor. They were looking to spend a “significant investment” on a large project and called upon Clear Measure to ensure success. Through collaboration and strategy sessions, Clear Measure was able to model leadership behavior to assist biBERK’s team in managing organizational change. Clear Measure created an automated pipeline to assist with the timing and frequency of deployments and to reduce risk and errors.

Clear Measure also introduced the use of Azure DevOps as a tool to increase transparency and improve productivity. In addition, Clear Measure took on the role of architect to align the organization as it executed the massive transformation project, aiding the technology executives in accomplishing the mission.

Automated deployments help biBERK by reducing the amount of downtime and providing the opportunity to do multiple deployments in one day. They can now release incremental changes to their software on a regular basis. In addition, biBERK has initiated a transformation into improvements of processes based on Clear Measure's recommendations. A tool has been developed to track metrics and measures of success.

The University of Texas Health & Sciences Center is one of the largest medical institutions in the southwest. It had seen an increase in the number of users on its Learning Management System (LMS), and Texas Early Childhood Professional Development System (TECPDS), both of which were integrated into CLI Engage. Therefore, they wanted recommendations on how to accommodate current and projected growth.

UTHealth anticipated a significant usage increase on their Learning Management System (LMS), and Texas Early Childhood Professional Development System (TECPDS) products that were integrated into their more comprehensive product, CLI Engage. The goal was to explore and validate the upper threshold of the user capacity for both LMS and TECPDS systems and make recommendations to accommodate projected growth.

Clear Measure proposed web app performance testing with Azure DevOps because it has UI web testing and load testing components built-in. Clear Measure had already built a testing harness for a previous project. Therefore, the cloud-based test implementation was a seamless process. Furthermore, we strategically constructed additional test cases to test the LMS and TECPDS systems based on user analytics and user feedback of the systems.

UTHealth was able to take the Phase 1 test results and make necessary updates to the TECPDS system. These updates enabled the system to support up to 400 concurrent users at any given time, providing a performance increase of over 600% from the previous test results. Clear Measure was able to increase the LMS system’s CPUs from 4 to 8, ultimately improving performance throughout the web application. However, Clear Measure recommended that target user counts remain below 200 concurrent users per server. Running LMS on a web farm improved performance and provided resiliency and scalability to the current system.

AlphaPoint is a financial technology (FinTech) company that makes illiquid assets liquid. AlphaPoint enables customers to launch new products and services by providing institutions enterprise-grade blockchain solutions to digitize assets, launch markets, and reduce operational costs.

The company helps companies scan their assets, such as real estate, gold, art, etc. Once assets are digitized, they can be traded using cryptocurrency to make illiquid assets liquid. Clients use their technology to launch exchanges across the globe so that end consumers will trade the cryptocurrency.

Before engaging Clear Measure, Alphapoint was manually provisioning cloud environments and deploying their cryptocurrency software on multiple servers. Environment provisioning and software deployments were a multi-day effort followed by several days of troubleshooting issues related to a new release. At the time of engagement, Alphapoint's development team was using approximately 10-15% of the automation capabilities of Octopus Deploy.

Clear Measure analyzed Alphapoint's deployment process and mapped out a strategic plan of action that would enable their DevOps team to fully automate their deployments. Using infrastructure as code and Octopus Deploy advanced features, Clear Measure was able to build a hands-free process for provisioning new customer environments. Additionally, Clear Measure trained the Alphapoint team on how to manage and maintain the deployment process and incorporate new features as requirements change.

Alphapoint can now provision new environments in four hours or less and deploy new features on demand. By increasing the utilization of Octopus Deploy's automation features from 10% to 80%, Alphapoint has gained a rise in productivity by over 84%.