Over the past year, Datical has had amazing success with our flagship product, Datical DB.  We’ve seen multiple visionary, sector-leading companies select Datical DB to drive their Application Schema changes.  Now that the number has grown rapidly over the past year, we can begin to see patterns in why customers choose Datical DB.

One of them turns out to be pretty emblematic of our other customers. So, let’s examine the reasons why they chose to adopt Datical DB.

Customer Facing Applications are the Front Door

When your competitor is only a mobile screen swipe away, this Datical customer focuses on brand reputation and customer satisfaction. They know that application uptime and fast delivery are key to customer retention and account expansion.

All applications have a database backend. Though, when something goes wrong with the database, it is not apparent to the consumer. The consumer just knows that the app isn’t working. An unresponsive mobile app or website is often enough to make the customer take their business elsewhere. Customer stickiness due to the hassle of changing providers continues to lessen as the cost to change continues to drop.

Therefore, immediate and fast access is a must have for today’s companies. Remember: Consumer facing applications don’t have business hours. They must ALWAYS be open.

Cross Team Collaboration

This Datical customer had difficulty in determining who made what change to the database. Moreover, answering which database and why was near impossible. All of the changes were stored in a single document. That solution is not multi-tenant, meaning that the team had to distribute the document to share information. Moreover, there was a single point of failure in the tracking process.

Too often, people were required to visit the datacenter for days at a time during application changes. There was simply no method to notify team members of changes, when they occurred, and the change impact.

This lack of communication led to almost 80% of all database change requests being rejected. There was clearly a need to increase communication of changes and increase the requested changes’ quality.

Increase Staff Productivity

With over 70% of the Database team’s time spent on managing change due to application requirements, the Database team was taxed in meeting other demands. Needs to improve scalability and reliability of the database servers became a lower priority as the DBAs struggled to keep up with change requests.

Furthermore, development teams spent almost 10% of their time managing these change requests, including reworks of failed requests.

By eliminating a manual, time-consuming process, this customer can now focus resources on addressing other needs such as managing continuity during server failure, better allocation of server resources, and certainly scalability concerns.

Go Faster

With the adoption of IBM UrbanCode Deploy, this customer quickly streamlined their deployments with all but the database automated. With all other components automated, the database changes required by application changes was clearly the weak link in the deployment chain. Truly, database automation is the last mile necessary to realize the promise of Agile, Continuous Delivery, and DevOps.

Until the customer was able to apply Agile and Continuous Delivery to database changes, the entire application stack was, in effect, still using out-of-date development and deployment methods. To see the complete benefits of Agile and Continuous Delivery, automation throughout the entire stack, including the database, was absolutely necessary.

Leverage Existing Infrastructure and Processes

With out of the box integration with UrbanCode Deploy, Datical DB did not require an independent separate server. Furthermore, with Datical DB’s ability to utilize the customer’s existing source code control repository, the implementation cycle was shortened significantly.

Too often, customers are asked by vendors to spend money on more server resources or make strange, unnatural changes to their network security to support potential solutions. By utilizing existing infrastructure and processes, Datical DB was able to deliver to this customer lightening quick ROI. We measure ROI in days and weeks, not months and years.

Please join us for a webcast next Wednesday, February 4^th, from 12:00 – 1:00 pm EST, as we discuss these customer benefits in detail and show how Datical DB integrates seamlessly with IBM UrbanCode Deploy.