What we delivered
- 5+ year ongoing partnership with a global pharmaceutical company
- Infrastructure-as-Code automation (Chef) cutting Time to Delivery by more than 60%
- CI/CD modernization with BitBucket, JFrog Artifactory, and Jenkins
- 300+ applications containerized across 20+ clusters in a hybrid on-premise/cloud model
The challenge
This global pharmaceutical company is a research-driven organization with infrastructure and engineering operations headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, operating at the scale and complexity that comes with developing medicines on a global stage.
The company had implemented a variety of tools to manage its IT infrastructure, but reliability issues kept surfacing — breakdowns and mismatches were common after patches, upgrades, or standing up new environments. Leadership knew the operating model needed to change, and turned to Versetal, already a trusted partner managing the company’s Oracle and SQL database services, to lead the transformation.
Client name is kept confidential per their standard policy; “Reimagining Medicine” is used here as a placeholder reference.
“We had implemented a variety of tools to manage our IT infrastructure; however, in simple terms, issues consistently arose. Whether it was after applying patches, conducting upgrades, or setting up new environments, instances of breakdowns and mismatches were all too common. We looked into the situation thoroughly and knew things had to change.”Global Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Reimagining Medicine
How Versetal helped
Versetal’s engagement began with infrastructure automation and expanded over five years into application deployment modernization and large-scale containerization — each phase building on the trust established in the one before it.
Infrastructure Automation
Versetal’s Operating Systems and Automation engineers automated server and virtual machine deployment — including OS installation and application setup — built on an Infrastructure-as-Code foundation using Chef. The shift cut the company’s Time to Delivery by more than 60%, while bringing new stability to environments that had previously been prone to breakdowns after patches and upgrades.
DevOps and CI/CD Modernization
Building on that foundation, Versetal led a comprehensive transformation of the company’s application deployment process, introducing enterprise-grade DevOps tooling: BitBucket for code repositories, JFrog Artifactory for binaries and package management, and Jenkins to orchestrate the CI/CD toolchain — with automated security practices embedded directly into the Jenkins pipeline.
Kubernetes Containerization at Scale
Versetal’s engineers and architects then designed a Kubernetes container platform and containerized the company’s diverse application portfolio — more than 300 applications across 20+ clusters, spanning on-premise infrastructure and public cloud (Azure and AWS) in a platform-agnostic hybrid model.
Outcomes
- Time to Delivery cut by more than 60% through Infrastructure-as-Code automation
- Infrastructure and OS/licensing costs both reduced by a third
- Application teams freed from infrastructure management to focus on development
- 300+ applications containerized across 20+ clusters in a hybrid on-premise/cloud model
- A 5+ year partnership built on consistent delivery, timeliness, and flexibility
“Versetal has been our valued partner for more than five years, facilitating a multitude of successful endeavors in modernizing our infrastructure and application landscape. What particularly stands out to me about Versetal is their unwavering dedication to project timeliness and the remarkable flexibility they extend throughout the project’s lifecycle.”Global Head of Infrastructure Engineering, Reimagining Medicine