DevOps Decrypted: Ep.29 - Modernising legacy systems: A deep dive into BetaNXT's journey

Frank shares BetaNXT’s journey, highlighting the challenges of driving change across multiple business units with distinct processes and long-standing workflows. We discuss the importance of having internal champions to encourage adoption and reflect on the impact of AI tools and security considerations.

This episode goes deep into Adaptavist’s approach to organisational transformation and how frequently incorporating valuable insights from a hands-on client such as Frank at BetaNXT will lead to a successful transformation.

Laura Larramore:

All right, hello, everyone! Welcome to DevOps Decrypted, where we talk all things DevOps. I'm your host, Laura Larramore. I'm here with our Adaptavist panel; today, we have Jobin and Matt from Adaptavist, and Nelson with Adaptavist. We're going to go around a little bit and introduce ourselves.

We also have Frank Merla today as a guest on our podcast – he's from BetaNXT. We did a case study with him that was very interesting for Adaptavist, so we'd like to talk about that a little bit today.

I'm Laura, I'm your host – I don't think that I've ever actually properly introduced myself on this podcast! I am a developer from Adaptavist, so I'm the developer in DevOps!

So, let's go around, let's talk about a little bit about what we do here and why we're here on this podcast today – just to kick it off – so let's go with Jobin, we'll start there.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

Sounds great! So, my name is Jobin, and I'm the Head of DevOps here at Adaptavist – yeah, we do all things DevOps! Not just the "dev" in DevOps, but everything compared. And I had the special privilege to work with Frank on the BetaNXT project, so I'm happy that Frank is here to talk more about it, and I hope that our listeners will have an opportunity to take away some good things out of this case study and how we did things for BetaNXT.

Matt Saunders:

So my name's Matt, I work for the Adaptavist CTO, Jon, who's often on this podcast – unfortunately, he can't be here today – so I help with internal DevOps initiatives, so yeah, Adaptavist is a big company now; Jobin does such great work with our customers, I attempt to do the same with my customers, which is the rest of Adaptavist, so, yeah that's me!

Nelson Jordan:

Name is Nelson Jordan, I’ve been with Adaptavist for about close to nine and a half years now, my current role is a Global Account Director, which Frank and BetaNXT are part of that in domain – and our goal is to help our valued customers grow both in breath and in depth and be a trusted, valued partner – and luckily I’ve had the opportunity and the pleasure of working with Frank the last two years in helping them grow and and helping transform their business – thank you so much, and I had over to Frank to introduce himself…

Frank Merla:

Alright, well I've had the pleasure to work with Jobin and Nelson on this call, pleasure to meet you Laura, Matt – and Adaptavist, thank you for inviting me to the podcast, it's definitely a first for me for being on a podcast, I just want to call that out – so it's an absolute pleasure.

My background? I am the Enterprise Solutions Architect at BetaNXT, Frank Merla. We've been working together since 2023 I think, is when we started our journey, and I also have some consulting background as well, not just on the client side – so I've had over about a decade of experience in my past employer at Capco. So it's nice to be on the client side of things I would say, you know with this new experience being at BetaNXT and working with Adaptavist, that all around it's been fantastic.

I know we're going to talk a lot about what we've done together with the PDLC and the tooling changes that we've done, and all that evolution that Jobin and Nelson have been working so hard alongside with us at BetaNXT – so, very excited, nice to meet you all!

Jobin Kuruvilla:

Thank you, Frank! So to kick things off, one quick question; digital transformation, it's always a hard thing to do, and you know, to get buy-in from everybody in the company, that's what we always are doing, right? To get buy-in from the top stakeholders, all the way down to the developers on the field – how did you manage to do that at BetaNXT

Frank Merla:

So, that is the hardest question. I mean, I think when you start talking about transformation and at the top of the house, the first thing you think about in transformation is efficiency, cost-cutting – how to become as efficient as possible, provide the most value in the most efficient way, and a cheap way, but still not losing any of that great functionality that you can thrive in your clients for some time.

When you go through any type of change, you're changing tooling; you're changing process. It's an old consulting way; you have to look at everything with people, process, and tooling.

The people part is the hardest part because when you're going through change transformation, it's easy to write things down on paper. It's easy to put nice, big fluff words in there for a client to see and see all the value you're getting in tooling. But sometimes, you forget about how people are actually going to adopt change and how well they're going to be able to adopt change, and the history of whether or not that they had to go through that change is also a critical component to where you have to start thinking about how you approach these things.

I think the hardest part that we had, working alongside Adaptavist and trying to go through that transformation with people, was that each business unit was different. Some business units were well easily adapted and ready to change, and willing to change, and they wanted to change. And that's very different to some other business units we had that were a little bit more hesitant. They were doing things in a specific way for quite some time; they've been working for them, so why change?

It's kind of like anything from a human standpoint. When you're trying to ask your grandparents to do something different on your phone, and they say, "What are you talking about? I don't know why you have to do it like this. Why can't I just do it the old same old way? I'd rather call someone; I don't want to text," right? It goes hand in hand with the same world that we're working in, in our industry. If they have a process that's been working for quite some time, how do you show them the value?

The biggest thing that we did to ensure that we had folks understand, number one, what we were doing and also start to get excited about what we were doing and adopt it was to establish proper governance in place. What we did at BetaNXT was we created a Centre of Excellence, and what we did there was help govern how we were going to change, how we were going to communicate those changes, and how you're going to collaborate with all three business units that we had at BetaNXT as part of that process.

I think the main piece that's probably most important to have been is making sure that the individuals that are changing are part of that change process. I think that's where the organisations can fall short very quickly. As an individual and as a human being, if I'm told, "You need to stop the way you're working today and do it this way," my first question is, "Why? When did this come about? Why wasn't I involved earlier?" and now I immediately have a barrier set up.

The hardest part as consultants and as clients is, how do you break through that barrier? By doing that, we did establish the Centre of Excellence. We did it first to make sure that our communication channels were open, our executive leadership was completely bought into what we were doing, and we were communicating what was changing on a very frequent basis, and those changes involved individuals that were being impacted.

Laura Larramore:

A sports analogy – a coach was talking about something that changed his career, and he went from being transactional to being transformational. That meant getting the players to buy in because he wanted something good for them versus something good for himself.

Do you think that, in going through these transformations, you were able to find ways to get people to buy in because they were able to see, "Hey, getting into this technology is good for me, not just good for these guys up in the C-suite or these shareholders or, you know, this bottom line that I care about a little bit, but I need something that's gonna benefit what I'm doing on the day-to-day"? You know what I mean?

Frank Merla:

I mean, you hit the nail on the head, Laura. It's exactly what we had to achieve at BetaNXT. In order to do that, we really needed to show the value of what's changing for them; what are they getting out of it? And I like to call it the road show – it's almost like the internal roadshow. I know salespeople know all about road shows, going out there, pitching to your clients, and getting them to buy in. You have to do the same thing internally. You have to show them what's changing, how it’s changing, and why we are changing it. What type of output are you gonna get? How is it going to make their day-to-day easier? How's it more efficient?

And that's what we had to make sure that we not only did consistently but we embedded into our process within the Centre of Excellence. So as we go through this transformation and change at any stage in the lifecycle, the PDLC, we have to design it, we have to solution it together with the people that are being impacted, and then we go through and actually configure it in a sandbox environment so we can do something that I call "seeing is believing." We present it and showcase what exactly it is that we are developing, why we are doing it, and what the impact is on the individuals who are going to potentially use this new process.

When you're able to showcase the value to them in person, what it looks like in the tooling, and also make sure they understand that they have hand-holding to be a part of that journey of that transformation, the training aspect, and training, I think, was actually a huge key to this too. And I think we should talk about that at some point in this podcast, about how we went about training internally at BetaNXT. I think the way that we did it, with videos and the types of videos that we did, the segmentation of the videos – it was a way for users to jump in and learn if they might not have been a part of the meetings or those roadshow sessions, and to be available for those drop-in sessions to explain it even further.

So the hand-holding was important, but just like you said, if you want those players on the field to be a part of that transformation, you need to show them. They need to be involved with it. They also need to have the ability to provide feedback if they don't like what you're showing in the roadshow. When you are taking feedback in from those individuals, they finally feel heard, and they see the output of what social change it’s making.

And the probability of them adopting it is going to go up. That's probably the biggest factor with any change transformation, regardless if you're doing it with software or in any aspect of consulting – if you're in regulatory, if you're in capital markets, wealth management.

It is the only thing, and the most important thing in my eyes, in my tenure, that helped me achieve success in any of my projects outside of BetaNXT as well.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

Yeah, I think a couple of things that you mentioned there – one is that proof of value, what we call POV, we do that with a lot of customers, and we have done that with BetaNXT as well – that's great, of course, and then you also mentioned a little bit about, you know, people getting excited about the change, right?

That is very important—we have to identify those who can actually get excited about this upcoming change.

We use them in the POV and then make sure that, okay, we show that value to the rest of the company. We have successfully done this at BetaNXT, and I've seen it work very well in some other customer engagements as well. I think you know if we can get them excited, wonders will happen.

Frank Merla:

Just to add to that, we Jobin… wherever we had a gap in what we were trying to produce for the POV or the MVP or whatever it was that we're designing to improve our way of working, Adaptavist had a subject matter expert to come in and bridge the gap—and I think that's a key tenet for working with a company like Adaptavist; you're not going to know everything. The client's not going to know everything.

I'm sure that as you go to different clients, you deal with different personalities, and even if they're not senior, sometimes you have conflict – because they think that their way is the only way, it's the best way – until they actually see another way of working. So, and can speak to another subject matter expert that's not the same level or higher, and I think that's where Adaptavist really shined, is if we had challenges that we had to face internally, we were able to bring in those subject matter experts from Adaptavist.

Matt Saunders:

Well, thank you for saying that… other solution providers are available, but no, we're the best!

And yes, I just wanted to pick up on a few things there – and just while you were speaking, Frank, there's so much good stuff in there, and I'm not just saying that because Adaptavist did it, but a lot of it just maps pretty directly onto some of the ways that we see other people undergoing transformations and doing that in a good way.

We start talking about things like digital transformation, and it almost suggests a big, uniform plan that's going to have drastic effects – and I think it's often underestimated the amount of work that you have to do to get people to do it, to get people to buy into it.

I was also reminded as you were speaking of Gene Kim's five ideals, especially when he talks about locality and simplicity in terms of what people actually need to do their job well – and yeah, we go in with a digital transformation with various goals of saving money, making the development process more efficient, will say etc.

If you can't actually install that locality and treat all the individual groups as individuals, then you're not going to get anywhere. And you need to cut these things down to make them simple, and make them make them relevant to the people the people involved – and yeah, I'm really glad that we were able to do that.

Frank Merla:

Yeah, we always try to start with that lens of trying to keep it simple.

I mean, the less clicks and the less confusion, the more likely they're going to adopt it – whether or not it may be simple to you is completely different than another user, so there's also some emotional intelligence you have to have for yourself of, "how do you think they're going to actually perceive what you just built?" – do you think that they're going to be open to it, just because for you doing it, maybe two or three clicks, is easy enough, for somebody else, that might be too complicated. So, I agreed.

Matt Saunders:

All this runs with figuring out how you treat– so you're providing a platform, effectively a couple of clicks, and I think the modern way of doing this, and I believe this has helped– we tried with you to implement this at BetaNXT, is to treat internal customers as if they're external customers. And so, yeah, it's not… if you go into any situation like this, and try and dictate and say, "no, you're gonna have to do it like this now", it's inevitable it's going to go wrong.

And so, sitting down with lots of people, lots of user studies, how people interact with systems, what they actually really need – and again, bringing those requirements to the table in a more formal and structured way. It feels like a hell of a lot of work, but it's absolutely essential, I think, to do this, actually.

Frank Merla:

You guys did a fantastic job when it came to the first step in this process – was figuring out what tooling, and you know, we were changing tooling across the board with the three different business units we had, and I mean just off the top of my head, I know we had SBN, we had Maven, we had Jenkins, we had Docker, we had BitBucket, Jira, Confluence – there were most of the business units, but some business units were using some of Jira, not all of Jira…

Going through that discovery and identifying what would make the most sense for BetaNXT based on our products and services that we're delivering to our clients, it's really where Adaptavist shined. That was a value, guys, I would say brought to the forefront, where our CTO said, "Aha! Okay, great, this makes sense. Yes, we understand the value of the tools that you're recommending."

It's scalable, it's flexible, and you know, when you choose the types of tools and you finalise what we are going to be leveraging for our target state toolset, the what has been answered. And the hardest part is the how—and that's where Adaptavist also came in and helped us with the Centre of Excellence stand up and the PDLC, defining it so we can get that MVP out the door and improve that.

It works, and it is working right now, and we're actually enhancing it and it's going through an evolution of changes to improve it across the board.

So, yeah, kudos to you guys – because I mean, I know that was the hardest part, and that took some time to actually go through that discovery and dig deep into, why did those individual business units choose those past tools? And what are the services they are providing? And then look at it holistically thereafter, and give that eagle eye view of, okay, now what's the right path forward so we can set them up for success, and set them up for scale? Because BetaNXT is a growing business.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

Indeed it is – and earlier you said the hardest question is answering the people part, right? But again, when it comes to a company like yours, and with the size and the scale that you have – you mentioned about some of the tools that you already named – but there are complex legacy systems in almost all big enterprises like yours, right?

And you know, integrating these legacy systems or migrating them to a new stack is never easy. Obviously, you have to get over the people hurdle; you have to get buy-in from all the folks, but that's just the beginning of the journey.

Once you have done that, yes, you identify the current state and the future state—but to get there, to navigate through all those technical challenges… it's not an easy task either, isn't it?

Frank Merla:

Yeah, and you guys did a fantastic job with that. We were working on it, and you're right because when you start looking at tooling, and you take a look at what's actually behind the scenes of a legacy platform, I mean, you see things that scare you sometimes… The number of issue types, workflow schemas, metadata that's in there, who's using what, the project container setups, how they are linking their dev tooling to their work management tooling…

Sometimes, depending on what you find, it starts throwing you curveballs, and you have to be ready to pivot. It can sometimes adjust what your target state actually was. So, being able to adjust on the fly, being able to pivot, and then, when you actually start going into those details, having to document it efficiently and have the right templates in place so you can actually go through that analysis in an efficient way – I think that's really where you guys helped us out tremendously with that.

Laura Larramore:

Yeah, I mean, just taking that on, taking on a legacy changeover, is so difficult. I have friends that work on a legacy codebase where it’s like 1,500 lines of Java, and it's like… until it breaks, we're not moving it, you know?! Because it's too much to even try to take on.

So, even trying to tackle some of these legacy systems, you really don't know what cobwebs you're getting into until you're in there. That challenge of trying to do that, once you've got everybody in, they're like, "Okay, we're in, what are we into?" You know?! So, I would like to hear more about how that went once you got in there.

Frank Merla:

Yeah, I mean, the plan of complexity, and we had to take our roadmap and adjust it a bit, right? I mean, I think when we look at certain business units that we have at BetaNXT, some are more complex than others, right? So we took a phased approach, onboarding one of the business units first with our MVP model within the PDLC. That was a proof of concept, our first test. Even though we ran pilots beforehand to ensure that it was successful for that one business unit, it's still a way to prove that it works to the other business units that might still be sceptical because they know they have processes developed back in the early 2000s, and it works. There's code behind it, so why change it? It's a risk if we do this with a client.

But if you're able to do that and showcase the value within the PDLC with the first business unit and see how it's impacting our clients and that business unit, then great – voila, we want to adopt this. A client is seeing that it's improved their experience dramatically by going into the ServiceNow portal and being able to collaborate directly with our relationship managers, compared to how it was done in the past, which would be an email, right? It would be back-and-forth emails about requirements and functional specs and then sidebar conversations with the architecture team. That leads to potential inefficiencies, and it means we're not providing a client experience that's as optimal as it should be.

So, from the client experience side, we approached it by starting with the business unit that was ready to adopt, and that proof of concept then became proof not only of how it improves our client experience but also of the internal KPIs. How are we improving internally from an efficiency perspective? How do you gauge and measure whether your intake process is improving or if your cycle time during delivery is starting to shorten? That transparency isn't going to be there if you don’t have a standard way of working or if you haven’t defined the KPIs needed to evaluate durable teams on the ground and how they’re going to interact with requests coming in through intake.

We also tried to put toll gates in place. One of the things we did in intake was to ensure that we’re not over-consuming the time of our sales team, product team, and architecture team by going through a full work breakdown structure for every request in the pipeline. So, certain toll gates had to be defined to improve efficiencies not only on the delivery side but also in assessing what our clients are asking us. Should we be devoting so much time, effort, and energy? That time, effort, and energy come with a cost.

By establishing standardised ways of working, especially in the intake side of things, it helps with cost savings, even if you can't put an exact figure against it. Now, your subject matter experts can focus on more valuable tasks. If a request comes in that isn’t even part of the product roadmap, they shouldn’t be assessing it. In the past, they were looking at everything, trying to break it down, and asking if they could deliver it before even deciding whether we should be delivering it.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

The return on investment is actually a funny thing – you mentioned people talking about whether they're actually realising the value. But obviously, at the end of the day, it's when you start really innovating, not worrying about the interference of the tools and the process, that's when you're actually returning that value, right?

So, obviously, yes, you cannot put a finger on a particular change we made and say, "This saved us X amount of dollars," but at the end of the day, you're still realising value because you're innovating faster, you're getting your product to the customers faster, and you're not worrying about the tool problems that you were worrying about earlier.

Frank Merla:

Absolutely, and that's exactly why we define the KPIs. One of the first things we did—I mean, even before I joined BetaNXT, the C-suite executives like Don Henderson were going through rigorous review sessions, and I even believe in Adaptavist as well—was to talk about what types of KPIs we want to achieve and how we can see whether or not the trends are improving. That was a big driver as to what type of information we’re looking to capture in intake and delivery.

Those KPIs are going to determine what type of metadata you need and what type of workflow statuses you need during intake, which was a critical component. And you're right; that's where you actually do see the value. If you're able to deliver faster to clients and provide a streamlined and more consistent way of interacting with them, you're improving the client experience, you're improving your delivery time, and it also helps with the retention of your workforce.

Employees know what they’re doing day-to-day, it’s defined, and there’s a more efficient onboarding process. They understand their roles and responsibilities. Sometimes, if you join a company where it’s too fast-paced, employees might feel a bit overwhelmed, and then you start seeing flight risk. This is a way to mitigate that as well.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

There is a reason why Developer Experience is a game in the town – and I think, Matt, you just recently had a webinar or a LinkedIn talk where you talked essentially about developer experience?

Matt Saunders:

Yeah, it's critically important. I mean, we've spent a number of years going through the process of working out how we get software imagined, developed, produced, operated effectively, and coordinated in DevOps. And yeah, I think it's very easy to forget about you, Laura, the developers in DevOps. I’m liking that we now have a bit of an initiative to do this sort of thing, and it ties into what you're saying, Frank, about the cognitive overhead we put on devs these days.

With so many different systems, even if they're best of breed and chosen for all the right reasons, there are still so many paper cuts in that world. Most developers I speak to don't care about things like cloud services, containers, Lambdas, firewalls, VPNs, security groups, all that sort of stuff, or even having to install 17 million different things on their laptop before they can write an application.

So yeah, shining a light on that and looking at how we’ve gone through all the hard work of providing guardrails, providing standardised ways of doing things through long transformation projects – if we're not putting ourselves in the developers' shoes, then we're not going to get started. People are going to churn. It's all very well to have a platform, the right tools, and even the right processes, but if we're not looking at how they actually deliver value, then it's for nothing.

And yes, I'm glad that we managed to put in something that speaks to those concerns.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

It's not just about developer care. I mean, obviously, that’s a big part of it, and developer experience is a huge thing now. But even when it comes to strategic partnerships, between vendors and customers and the partners that work on these kinds of engagements – again, an important factor is the experience throughout.

I remember Nelson being, you know, the main person talking to BetaNXT and Adaptavist. I know he’s part of Adaptavist, but being that partner is an important thing. Nelson, do you want to talk a little bit about your experience on this particular project and how that partnership actually blossomed?

Nelson Jordan:

Will do; it was an interesting, interesting dynamic. Right, so we first started Jobin and I, and I believe in the very beginning as well, we looked at it as BetaNXT coming to us from a tool perspective. This was pre-Frank days, before he joined the team. We initially saw it from a tools perspective and then took a step back. I would say, you know what, this really is not a tool engagement. You’re transforming your business, right? You’re incorporating three different business units into one business unit.

So, from the very onset, we took a step back from an account perspective and looked at what the business needs were, what was driving the strategy, and what they were looking to achieve strategically. We came around to saying that this is really a transformational engagement, and that actually helped us assemble the team from a transformational perspective.

We brought in Ronnie, who was a really high-level system architect, to take a high-level view, not from a purely tool-based perspective. Then we changed our infrastructure organisation to take on more of an account-centric model, where we had myself as the architect, not only working directly with the client but also with our internal teams, ensuring everything gets done from a quality and integration perspective and basically being there for the client whenever they had any concerns.
I know Frank.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

I have to interject here because it was a little like that, you know. There were times when I was actually suspecting Nelson was working for BetaNXT! Being the delivery head, because Nelson always used to speak on behalf of the customer. That actually helped immensely in this transformation engagement, and I'm glad he did that.
I'm sure, Frank, you are as well, because that plays a key role, you always start to think about the problems the customer is facing, right, and work together to solve those problems. That was an important part of our success.

Nelson Jordan:

I had times I felt like Frank was joined at the hip, right?! How many times did we have those conversations at nine, ten o'clock in the evening around potential concerns? What I really love about the relationship is that if the client had a concern or perceived a concern, we quickly mitigated the problem instead of waiting for it to fester. That was highly successful.

Frank Merla:

And you did a fantastic job with being able to pivot on the fly. If we hit a challenge or a roadblock, we were able to adjust quickly. I think that's critical when you're going through this transformation effort; if a change is needed, and it will be, right, depending on who's on the ground and the type of subject matter expertise you might need for the next phase of the project, you have to change quickly.

You have to bring in the right people. Not saying there were any wrong people. but just that the skill sets we needed as we were going through this entire journey were constantly evolving; they were changing. So we had to bring in those skill sets to make sure we were successful. And Nelson was attached at the hip – I'm just waiting for him to sign the contract I sent him to work at BetaNXT, so…

Matt Saunders:

Get your hands off, he’s ours!

Nelson Jordan:

Hey Frank, I did want to touch on one thing: I know we're coming close to the top of the hour.

We know that this was a huge transformation engagement, right, which brought its own issues, concerns, and challenges, especially on the people-side. But one of the major considerations that was always in the back of our minds was the decision that we had to get off a certain environment because there were fees associated with it, huge, huge penalties.

Yeah, talk a little bit about the impact that had on the transformation and the team.

Frank Merla:

Yeah, so I mean that's kind of where, when you're trying to figure out what your roadmap and your plan is for what needs to get done first. I think we tried to touch on it a little bit earlier. Obviously, the top of the house at any organisation cares about cost—how you're going to save money and how it looks on the bottom line. And you obviously can't be paying for licences with both your legacy platforms and the target state tooling set that you're bringing in at the same time; it just wouldn't be sustainable for the company because you'd be paying for two tool sets doing the same things.

So, the priority quickly became migrating off those legacy platforms and tools to get into the target state. We almost had to take an approach of, "Can we do this with a lift and shift, bringing them into the target state tooling and then integrating them into the PDLC standard way of working?" We had to make sure they had the proper training to do this at a pace that wouldn't put any of the business at risk, and I think that was the main goal.

And, like in any other company, priorities change. Executives might come down and say, "Hey, work on XYZ initiative," and then the next day say, "Put that on hold; this is now the top priority." But yes, cost was number one, and getting off those legacy tools was the first thing we had to do. However, we knew we couldn't slow down on defining what the PDLC actually was.

So, to ensure we didn't fall behind, we followed the directive of moving off those legacy tools but also pushed forward with defining the standardised PDLC. Sometimes, you have to move things in parallel, and you really need to push things a lot faster. Getting off the legacy toolset and into our target state tooling was the top priority, and we did that successfully. In fact, we achieved it much sooner than expected. I believe we did it six months before the original target date.

Jobin Kuruvilla:

It was great that we could achieve it.

Now, you mentioned pivoting quite a few times already, and it's true because, you know, technology never stops evolving. And we have seen, especially in the last year… I have to mention the word "AI" here… that AI technologies have been coming out and have changed the game for a lot of companies.

I can already see that BetaNXT is not stopping; they’re still evolving and are looking at all these latest, greatest technologies. Do you want to speak a little bit more about how we are looking at AI, the evolution of AI, and similar things in the technology world?

Frank Merla:

One of the benefits of working for a company that's owned by a private equity firm is the ability to work fast and adopt fast, especially with technology. You can see how much AI is evolving and how quickly it's advancing, sometimes at a rate that could be scary to some people. So, it’s actually very much a part of our strategy.

What we're doing at BetaNXT from an AI perspective is trying to embed AI into our ecosystem in a way that improves how we operate internally, as well as how the client experience is impacted. As part of these initiatives, you have to make sure that security is the number one consideration when you're talking about AI. How are you embedding it into your ecosystem? What type of AI are you embedding? Are there any vulnerabilities that could arise if you implement AI into your tooling?
We take these considerations very seriously at BetaNXT. Before making any decisions on any type of AI solution, we always conduct a thorough assessment from a security and vulnerability standpoint. We are definitely taking it seriously and looking at ways AI can help. Right now, we’re working with Co-Pilot at BetaNXT, and it’s showing a ton of results, particularly in improving efficiencies across our operations.
For example, Co-Pilot helps by completely capturing meeting minutes, so you don't need a PM on every call documenting minutes and capturing next steps and action items. It does a great job in that area, allowing us to work faster. Given the speed at which we have to operate at BetaNXT, this is essential to our success.

AI tooling helps us deliver faster, so when executives come together and say, "We want you to focus on this new initiative," the AI tools help us meet the timeline they're expecting. I think that’s where the biggest value lies.

Laura Larramore:

Appreciate that it's always helpful to be a little more efficient! As we wrap up, let's go ahead and give a little bit of our final takeaways here – so let's kick that off with Matt, do you have any final takeaways for our audience?

Matt Saunders:

For audience yeah so I'm just going to riff on them one of the last things that Frank said which is he's now in a position where his exists can come to him was something that they need to do and they can go and get that delivered better faster safer etc yes A1 – result.

Laura Larramore:

Absolutely… Jobin?

Jobin Kuruvilla:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think we talked a lot about the role of Adaptavist in this particular transformation, but I have to say one of the major takeaways for me from this engagement was the fact that we had somebody like Frank on the other side of the fence.

It's always good to have a stakeholder with the customer who is invested in understanding and ready to work with a partner and be part of the journey. I think that is very important when it comes to any transformation, because it’s a partnership at the end of the day. You cannot rely on one team to tell you a success story; you have to work together to create that story.

And if you have people like Frank on the other side of the fence, it really helps with that journey. So, I’ll just say thanks to Frank.

Frank Merla:

Thank you, Jobin. Just one thing I want to call out that’s extremely critical for change transformation is you need to have champions across the client organisation who are going to be with you for that journey. You need to find people who are passionate about change, passionate about making their jobs and the jobs of people around them more efficient. If you don’t have that, it can be extremely stressful, and impossible.

I know that goes back to the people aspect we talked about at the beginning of this podcast, but I can’t stress it enough. At BetaNXT, we have champions across each of the business units who are ready for change, they want the change, they’re driven, they take part in the Centre of Excellence, they’re bought into it, and they all have their stamp on what we’ve defined. That is extremely critical.

So, I need to give a shout out to BetaNXT as a whole for actually being champions of this journey we’ve undertaken with Adaptavist. That has been one of the biggest factors behind why we’ve been successful so far.

Laura Larramore:

A lot of people on the podcast always hear me say it comes down to your people – your people matter.

Nelson, your takeaway?

Nelson Jordan:

Just to add to what Frank said, right, so before Frank came on, we had challenges finding those influencers within BetaNXT. We had our top senior executives, but we all know that a top-down and bottom-up approach is essential. When Frank came on, he brought that bottom-up approach and allowed us to facilitate influence across BetaNXT.

So, Frank, I don’t know how you know, but you came in at a critical juncture. Technology is great; it’s easy, right? It gets done. But the people part, which we really struggled with at the beginning, was resolved when you came in. You allowed us to connect with those influencers and made this transformation a lot easier. So for that, I’d like to thank you.

Laura Larramore:

I love a good story, and I appreciate that this podcast today has been a good story of transformation. You took us through the beginning with getting the buy-in, then down to dealing with the costs, dealing with what it takes to move from legacy systems, and what it takes to do all of this. You covered what determines the outcome, what the outcome of a transformation is, and how that story weaves together. So, I appreciate that this has been a good podcast; I've enjoyed it!

Jobin Kuruvilla:

According to Gartner, 70% of transformation projects fail… so there's a reason this one is a successful one, and I hope our listeners will take something good from it. I 100% agree with you, Laura; it's a good story, and I'm glad to be part of it. We all are.

Laura Larramore:

Yeah, it's a great story, and I think it hinges on the people. I really do. I will always live and die on that hill: the people matter!

So, for DevOps Decrypted, with Jobin, Matt, myself, and Nelson, and our wonderful guest today, Frank Merla from BetaNXT, this has been DevOps Decrypted in the Adaptavist podcast network. We appreciate you listening. We'll see you next time – thank you, guys, and we're out.