Magenic
The Fast-Forward Approach toward a Digital Future

The trade-off between speed and quality is a classic problem plaguing virtually every industry. It is nearly impossible to maintain both pace and quality at once. This can be explained through a simple example. Consider you were driving down the road a little too fast and missed a turn you needed to take to reach your destination. You obviously didn’t intend to miss the turn, but driving at a higher speed and paying attention to the surroundings at the same time became a difficult task for you. The same also plays out quite uniquely in the digital endeavours of global businesses. As organizations opt for rapid implementation of IT initiatives to outpace their competitors, they eventually fall short in accommodating all the emerging trends in their respective fields of operations. The result? The overall initiative fails to ‘take the right turn’ of capturing contemporary consumer expectations and delivering the intended outcome.

The silver lining is many businesses are now acknowledging that it is not only about moving fast but also about moving smart. The organizations realize that they need to consider all the latest market demands while playing their cards right for delivering a successful IT product. While the trade-off between speed and quality is inevitable, a thorough analysis of the current trends and balanced judgment about the future offers the key to unlocking organizational success. Welcome to the era of fast-forward thinking.

“GOING THE EXTRA MILE, WE CREATE THE NECESSARY DEVOPS MINDSET AROUND APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT”

According to Greg Frankenfield—an experienced IT entrepreneur and one of the champions of fast-forward thinking—the ideology doesn’t only denote an increased speed to market. It is a precise mix of strategy, processes, and right talent that guarantees successful digitalization efforts. As the driving force behind the company, Frankenfield’s company Magenic assists its clients to embed the philosophy of fast-forward thinking in their digitalization efforts and stay ahead of the competition.

“Magenic helps businesses define, build, and optimize software-based processes to fast-forward their digital transformation and business results,” said Frankenfield, the Co-Founder and CEO of Magenic. Whether a client is migrating their software portfolio to the cloud, modernizing legacy systems, automating quality engineering, or optimizing their software development cycle through DevOps, Magenic has the time-proven skillsets and capacity to drive success.

Microsoft Azure: The Next Frontier

Magenic, since its inception in 1995, has not only witnessed how Microsoft products and services, particularly Azure, can transform businesses and industries; the company has proactively strategized and aligned its goal with the needs of the Microsoft technology deployment space to address the persistent market challenges. As a result, Magenic has emerged as one of the global leaders in the high-end application development arena, with 25 years of laser-focused expertise in Microsoft products and services. And now amid the pandemic, Magenic is training its consultants to position itself as a world-class cloud-based solution provider. “The COVID-19 situation is accelerating the importance of key technologies like ML and AI, as well as user-centric digital product design. Subsequently, the Azure cloud is becoming the primary delivery platform,” highlights Frankenfield.

Affirming the CEO’s statement, Dustin Kangas—the newly appointed Cloud CTO of Magenic—further adds that the company’s thought leadership team showcases unparalleled domain expertise in Azure, DevOps, digital product strategy, and experience design. The Magenic team proactively keeps a finger on the pulse of recent trends around Azure cloud and drives innovation in these areas, while helping strike a middle ground between speed and quality of digital endeavours.

Kangas comments, “To better optimize our fast-forward process, each leadership role has a clearly defined function built for agility and accountability.” Leveraging this team of experts, Magenic builds its fast-forward approach upon the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and makes even the most complex products well within reach of Magenic’s clients. The company enables its client to look at individual applications and determine the best fit to accelerate their cloud adoption. For this, Magenic is extensively investing in easy-to-use and implement ‘Accelerators’ that can quickly create Azure cloud migration roadmaps for clients.

MAGENIC HELPS BUSINESSES DEFINE, BUILD, AND OPTIMIZE SOFTWARE-BASED PROCESSES TO FAST-FORWARD THEIR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND BUSINESS RESULTS

Cloud Migration for Individual Applications

Magenic’s Cloud Readiness Accelerator provides a proven and repeatable process that empowers its clients to migrate their applications to Mircosoft Azure faster. It is ideal for aligning the business and shifting its processes to the cloud faster. Cloud Readiness Accelerator brings all the dependencies of an application to ascertain how to lay the workloads out at scale and build those into the cloud offering, thereby fast-forwarding cloud migration. “The focus is to deep dive into an existing application and works through what migration and monetization strategy could work for that application, as well as how it will interact with Azure,” states Kangas.

Magenic also organizes a workshop with its clients to understand their business needs and create backlogs for devising a step-by-step cloud migration strategy. The implementation plan additionally includes the Azure Well-Architected Review with targeted reference architecture for quick and efficient digitalization of business applications. As a result, businesses can assess the existing status of their application, and with Azure competency processes, they can also paint a clear picture of organizational modernization readiness. It helps clients prioritize product backlogs in their Agile development, comprising both functional and nonfunctional requirements. Moreover, they can quickly and effectively determine a prioritized product delivery strategy and opt for sprint-based development cycles, where they can reprioritize and create new backlogs as they go.

Cloud Migration for an Entire Application Suite

Built on top of the Cloud Readiness Accelerator is Magenic’s Cloud Portfolio Accelerator that helps clients take a broader look at all their business applications. It is particularly tailored to identify and prioritize a portfolio of applications and develop a strategic roadmap. In this methodology, applications are evaluated using a two-part analysis. The first one, business rationalization, determines the overall application value. Technical evaluation, on the other hand, determines the cloud-readiness and overall job size of up to 250 to 300 applications. Kangas comments, “So it’s taking the same principles of cloud readiness accelerator and bringing that to a larger portfolio of applications at a much greater scale with additional functionalities.”

The portfolio accelerator uses the 12-factor methodology to align clients’ applications with different cloud maturity models (like pre-cloud, cloud-ready, cloud-friendly, cloud-resilient, and cloud-native).

In this step-by-step journey from cloud-ready to cloud-native, clients can stop at any stage of the process if they require it.

Driving Digitalization with Strong DevOps Principle

Complementing its cloud accelerators, Magenic brings DevOps culture to its application development and operations. DevOps plays a crucial role in everything the company does and serves as the linchpin of its cloud migration strategy. “Going the extra mile, we create the necessary DevOps mindset around application development,” underscores Saima Prabhu, head of global DevOps and QE at Magenic. She explains that historically, DevOps has been an often overlooked factor in the application development methodology for many companies. Consequently, these entities end up compromising either time or the quality of their deliverables. To help clients with similar concerns, Magenic builds accelerators, where its DevOps and Cloud experts help the client understand the maturity level of their DevOps process. Based on that, Magenic creates an implementation plan for improving cloud maturity further.

Besides, Saima believes that continuous automation, low maintenance frameworks, skilled engineers are an integral component of an ideal DevOps culture. Unless the coverage and pace of quality testing are enhanced, it is difficult for businesses to make the right decision while working in sprints. It remains a challenge for organizations to find the breakpoint if their application workflow fails. “So we put a huge emphasis on integrating the automation framework directly with the build and the deployment processes, making it seamless and free from any manual intervention,” says Saima.

It’s All About Taking an Innovative Approach

Notably, in addition to its illustrated capabilities and prowess, the secret ingredient of Magenic’s recipe for success is an overall inventive outlook toward the contemporary business problems. Being founded by two application developers, Magenic has always been uniquely positioned to understand the pertinent issues associated with digitalization. “We thrive on solving mission-critical business problems with technology, and we can develop solutions that deliver both quality and speed-to-market to help our clients win in today’s highly competitive marketplace,” states Frankenfield. Such a positive attitude has helped Magenic create a culture of innovation and passion for its team. Moreover, Magenic places equal importance on every employee’s opinions regarding the best course of action for a client and decides collaboratively.

Toward a Digital Tomorrow

At this juncture, talking about his company’s future prospects, Frankenfield notes that the business sector is in the eye of the storm that the current pandemic has brought with it, and the trend will continue in the coming months. Therefore, Magenic will continue to focus on helping the clients move their applications to the cloud and develop and achieve software faster to fulfill their digital transformation goals by using speed as a competitive advantage. This would include a continued emphasis on cloud and use of offerings like Magenic’s Cloud Readiness and Portfolio Accelerator to speed-up the development of a clear and achievable roadmap for clients’ journey to the cloud. Simultaneously, the company is also presently working on recruiting and retaining best-in-class talent to drive success for Magenic and its clients. Other areas that Magenic is exploring to serve customer needs are: architecting cloud environments, managing cloud applications, and providing low code solutions where appropriate. “We strive to stay ahead of the constant pace of innovation in the cloud space to ensure that our customers make the very best choices available during their moderation journey,” concludes Frankenfield.