Volkswagen Financial Services adopts Microsoft Azure PaaS faster with software intelligence

CAST Highlight enabled the Head of Azure Services to automate the cloud migration and modernization planning process and complete the project 25% faster.

Challenge

VWFS wanted to modernize their critical business applications and leverage Microsoft Azure to increase innovation, improve scalability, reduce complexity, and optimize costs. They targeted 120 of their critical business applications managed by 400 developers in 8 countries.

The Head of Azure Services needed to complete the project in 2 years and modernize the applications to utilize cloud native PaaS services. It was extremely challenging for the team to understand each application’s cloud maturity, identify the required code changes, and estimate the necessary effort without relying solely on opinions from application owners.

Solution

VWFS selected CAST Highlight to speed up the modernization planning process, ensure accuracy, and build a roadmap for each application based on the technical characteristics of the software.

It automatically analyzed the source code of each application and generated intuitive dashboards detailing cloud maturity, technical debt, and open source risks that enabled VWFS to better plan their migration. Insights included identification of specific blockers in the code that needed to be removed, estimated effort required, and recommendations on the specific Azure services each application could utilize once migrated.

Results

VWFS analyzed the entire portfolio of 120 applications automatically by integrating CAST Highlight with their source code repositories across the enterprise.

VWFS completed the project in 1.5 years, well ahead of schedule. They estimate that the automated approach powered by CAST Highlight saved them 25% of the time (3 – 6 months) during the planning phase of the project and helped them avoid costly hurdles during the migration process.