e-Commerce Firm Isagenix Deploys Actifio

Actifio, Inc. announced that Isagenix International, LLC, a provider of products for healthy living, has deployed its industry copy data management software.

With Actifio, Isagenix has gained faster, flexible copy data access for DevOps, business intelligence (BI), reporting, and help desk functions, resulting in reduced infrastructure and operating costs.

Isagenix is a growing e-Commerce company that provides systems for weight loss, energy, performance, and healthy aging. With more than 570,000 members worldwide it produces hundreds of products, packs, and systems for healthy living. As a company operating in 13 countries, it was struggling to build and launch new applications to support its double-digit annual revenue growth.

In order to keep pace with business growth, Isagenix needed to speed up its application development processes, which relied on creating multiple copies of production data running on mirrored infrastructure. In many instances, this resulted in a process taking up to a full week just to create the data needed to develop and test applications.

In its effort to speed up its development processes, Isagenix looked for a solution that could help with three things: quickly spinning up new environments, running smoothly in existing infrastructures, and simplifying and expediting the DevOps work streams and process. With Actifio, Isagenix produces the needed copies of production data, but without all of the duplicate infrastructure.

“We knew what we were looking for, and we found that and more with Actifio,” said Erl Egestad, VP of architecture, Isagenix. “It used to take one week to gain access to our data. We were hoping to get it down to one day. With Actifio, we can now access copies of production data in 30-40 minutes, and prepare a full environment in about three hours.“

Isagenix benefits:

• DevOps Services
  • Created versatile DevOps services that achieve better, faster, application cycle times
  • Introduced an automated continuum from development to test to QA
  • Direct positive business impacts through rapid, high confidence solutions deployments
  • Reduced costs for hardware, software and licensing for internal application test and development environments
    

• Test and Development
  • Near-instant access to production data
  • Accelerated Dev/Test services providing high-quality development and testing resources
  • Ability to test solutions against production data in a non-production environment
  • Capability to automate or manually test against production environment data at will
    

Isagenix strategic use of virtual copies of production data to speed up its application development process for greater business value is underscored in the November 2016  Gartner note: Predicts 2017: BC Management and IT Service Continuity Management.

According to commentary in this recent note from Dave Russell, VP and distinguished analyst, storage technologies and strategies, Gartner, Inc.: “Long-standing IT operations, such as application, middleware or OS patches, can be tested more easily, and reports can be executed against more recent copies of data. Additionally, new and emerging use cases, such as DevOps for faster application development and business analytics, can be facilitated by faster access to more recent versions of data, and further aided by improvements in capacity savings that can result from leveraging already captured data.“

“Software is eating the world, and the companies able to develop new capabilities faster will be the ones who win,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO, Actifio. “Isagenix’s use of Actifio shows once again how enterprise copy data virtualization technology is essential to accelerating new products, and expediting both the analysis and the resolution of issues.“