This case study is for the same organization, but takes a variety of viewpoints. This allows you to understand the different perspectives of cloud computing.

The Company

Global Imports is a worldwide company that buys and sells arts and craft products, along with decorating accessories, in 20 countries.

Each country has its own sales team. GI has a web site, but is now looking to outsource some of its data to a cloud provider. In addition, GI is considering moving to a new CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application from a cloud provider.

GI has over 2,000 customers which are other stores and store chains. They also have over 50,000 individual customers that buy products directly from the GI web site. At any given time, they have at least 500 external users on the site and have had as many as 5,000 at peak buying times.

The Business User Perspective

Paul is a sales manager for Global Imports. Paul’s job is to keep retail stores supplied with the products GI sells. Like most users, Paul consumes some basic IT services, including file storage, email, and so on. He also interacts with a CRM application that his company owns, and he uses an in?house order management application.

Paul works on a team of more than 60 salespeople that are distributed across the globe: His company sells products to resellers in 20 countries and has sales offices in 10 of those countries.

Paul’s biggest concerns are the speed of the CRM and order management application. He spends three-quarters of his day using these applications, and much of his time today is spent waiting on them to process his input and serve up the next data entry screen.

His own informal measurements suggest that about one-third of that time—just under 2 hours a day—is spent waiting on the computer. He knows exactly how much he generates in sales every hour, and since he’s paid mainly on commission, he knows that those 9 hours a week—almost a quarter of his work time—are costing him dearly.

The company averages 700 orders per day, but at peak buying season, they have received up to 2,000 orders per day.

He complains and complains to his IT department, as does everyone else, but feels that it’s mostly falling on deaf ears. The IT guys don’t seem to be able to make things go any faster. There’s talk now of outsourcing some of the applications Paul uses, such as the CRM application. Ernesto just hopes it doesn’t run any slower—he can’t afford it to run any slower.

Then there was the meeting with Marketing last week where Paul made the comment that their main competitor was introducing a new global distribution system based on cloud computing. This new system will allow their competitor to ship products faster because they can make better use of distribution centers closer to the stores they serve.

Paul is trying to convince senior management to think about doing something similar or else they may lose some very large customers.

The IT Perspective

Maria works for Global Import’s IT department, and is in charge of several important applications that the company relies upon—including the CRM application and the in-house order management application.

Maria has set up extensive monitoring to help manage the IT department’s SLAs for these applications. They’ve been able to maintain 99.97% availability for both applications, a fact John is justifiably proud of. The monitoring includes several front-end application servers, some middle?tier servers, and a couple of large back-end databases—one of which replicates data to two other database servers in other cities.

Maria primarily monitors key metrics for each server, such as processor and memory utilization, and she monitors response times for database transactions. She also has to monitor replication latency between the three database servers. Generally speaking, all of those performance numbers look good.

As an end-point metric, she also monitors network utilization between the front?end servers and the client applications on the network. She doesn’t panic until that utilization starts to hit 80% or so, which it rarely does. When it does, she’s automatically alerted by the monitoring solution, so she feels like he has a pretty good handle on performance.

The company’s users complain about performance, of course, but the client application has always run fine on Maria’s own client computer, so she figures the users are just being users.

The company plans to start moving the CRM application to an outsourced vendor, probably using a SaaS solution. They also plan to move the in-house order management application into a cloud computing platform, which should make it easier to access from around the world, and help ensure that there are always computing resources available to the application as the company grows.

Maria is relieved because it’ll mean all this performance management stuff will be out of her hands. She just needs to make sure they get a good SLA from the hosting providers, and he can sit back and relax at last.

Senior Management Perspective

Senior management at Global Imports have been very frustrated the past three years because it takes months to get new features to their web site and to their customers. They keep hearing from the IT department that the current system is hard to maintain, even though they have made large investments in the software.

Robert, the CIO is considering proposing transitioning three of their current applications to the cloud: The web site, customer relationship management and order management. However, the CIO is still somewhat concerned about the risks such as security, loss of control and integration with other systems in use at the company.

The CEO and the marketing chief would love to see Global Imports develop and deploy a mobile application for decorators to use in finding and buying the right items while they are decorating a house or office. However, that seems like a distant goal because no one at Global Imports has experience in building mobile apps.

The CFO is very concerned about compliance with standards such as Sarbanes-Oxley, and PCI. Global Imports’ accountants have warned senior management that they must address issues such as security risks and lack of good software development and testing practices.

Testing Perspective

Sergy is a test manager at Global Imports. He works about 10 hours a day trying to manage the activity of 10 testers and 3 test automators. The problem is that each release of the web site application contains over 10,000 functions, 75% of which must be manually tested.

It is also depressing for Sergy to think about the over 25,000 unresolved defects in the defects tracking system.

Global Imports has over 20,000 test cases and owns 3 copies of a popular capture/playback tool, but no performance testing tool. The test team doesn’t have a very good test environment, due mainly to budget constraints.

Three Months Later

After much deliberation, the CIO went forward with his proposal to transition some applications and platforms to the cloud. This is a big step and uncharted territory for the entire company.

The senior management team is excited about the cost savings and the hopes of being more flexible to meet business needs. This worries the CIO because he fears their expectations may be too high.

Sergy, the test manager, called the CIO to request a meeting to discuss the impact to the test function. Thankfully, Robert, the CIO, has been a supporter of the QA and Test function at Global Imports. The CIO asked Sergy to develop a test strategy and design a cloud-based test environment. Sergy was also asked to perform a risk assessment.

The Cloud Computing Provider Perspective

Greg works for Cloud Space Services, a cloud computing provider. Greg is in charge of their network infrastructure and computing platform, and is working with Global Imports, who plans to shift their existing Web services?based order management application into Cloud Space’s cloud computing platform.

Cloud Space works with major SaaS vendors to help companies have an easy transition to using a variety of cloud-based applications.

Greg knows that he’ll have to provide statistics to Global Imports IT department regarding Cloud Space’s platform availability, because that availability is guaranteed in the SLA between the two companies. However, Greg is worried because he knows most of Global Import’s end users already think their order management application is slow. He knows that, once the application is in the cloud, those “slow” complaints will start coming across his desk.

He needs to be able to prove that his infrastructure and platform are performing well so that Global Imports can’t pin the blame for slowness on him. He knows, too, that he needs to be able to provide that proof in some regular, automated way so that Global Imports has something they can look at on their own to see that the Cloud Space platform is running efficiently. He knows his customers aren’t asking for that kind of detail yet—but he knows they will be, and he doesn’t yet know how he’s going to provide it.

Six Months Later

Two cloud-based applications have been selected:

OrangeHRM - OrangeHRM offers a flexible and easy to use HRIS solution for small and medium sized companies. By providing modules for personnel information management, employee self service, leave, time & attendance, benefits and recruitment companies are able to manage the crucial organization asset - people. The combination of these modules into one application provides a platform for re-engineering and aligning HR processes along with the organizational goals.

vtigerCRM - vtiger CRM is a complete CRM solution that includes Sales, Service & Marketing modules, and ERP modules for Inventory & Projects.

• End to End Sales cycle management from Campaigns, Leads, Potentials, Quotes, Invoices..
• Support Automation include Customer portal
• CSV Import & Export features, Web form integration, Reports & Dashboards
• Role based access control
• Workflows, Mobile clients, ...etc
• Project Management module
• Outlook, Thunderbird, Firefox, & GMail plugins for Mail integration
• Extensions marketplace with additional plugins

Sergy, the test leader, is designing the tests for these two applications. After working with the applications for a few days, Sergy realizes that it may be helpful to explore some cloud-based test tools.