Trifecta Clinical Achieves Data Agility To Improve Software Quality And Accelerate Sales And Customer Success

Based in Los Angeles, Trifecta Clinical develops software used by Pharmaceutical Sponsors and Clinical Research Organizations to support human-subject clinical research. Trifecta’s Software as a Service (SaaS) platform provides training, document management, and pharmacovigilance reporting. Together, these integrated solutions provide a platform that accelerates study start-up and reduces time to market for new therapies.

Challenge

Trifecta needed to quickly evolve its offerings including InvestigatorSpace.com, a web-based management portal revolutionizing how organizations coordinate clinical trial operations. By continuing to develop innovative new features for this flagship software platform, Trifecta hoped to differentiate itself in a competitive market.

However, data management stood in the way: 

• Spinning up new data environments could take up to a day, slowing down critical processes ranging from application development, data cleansing, integration testing, and even customer demos.

• Slow provisioning of production support environments meant that dev/test teams spent a disproportionate amount of time finding and fixing defects instead of expanding functionality.

• Because of data storage limitations, development teams shared a limited number of non-production environments —practices that introduced risk and time-consuming coordination challenges.

• Non-production environments were refreshed from disaster recovery data. This forced development and QA teams to work with stale data, undermining confidence in release quality.

To attract and satisfy demanding customers seeking every advantage in high-stakes clinical trials, Trifecta needed to out-innovate the competition. But data-related challenges threatened to limit development velocity, quality, and, correspondingly, business growth.

Solution

Trifecta chose the Delphix Data Platform to transform its approach to data. With Delphix, data operators provision and refresh non-production data in minutes instead of hours. Developers and testers no longer wait for data and operate more confidently knowing that test environments reflect the state of production. And since Delphix provisions virtual data copies that take up almost no extra storage, teams have the flexibility to create ad hoc environments to support onsite customer demos, acceptance testing, sandboxing, and production troubleshooting.

As a part of its Delphix implementation, Trifecta transitioned from bare-metal servers to a Delphix Reference Architecture (DRA) appliance encapsulating compute, network, storage, as well as pre-installed Delphix software. This hyper-converged, virtualized approach allowed Trifecta to implement the Delphix platform in under a week with a low-risk, high-performing, and cost-effective solution.

Results

Improved data agility from Delphix impacted Trifecta across several areas of its business: 

• Operations teams quadrupled the number of non-production environments available to data consumers, giving developers, testers, and sales engineers immediate access to high-quality data without increasing storage requirements.

• Early bug detection increased by 20%, allowing teams to remediate errors in the initial stages of the SDLC when bugs were easier and less expensive to fix.

• The significant reduction in time devoted to production support and late-stage QA allowed Trifecta to shift its focus towards driving innovation—teams spent 25% more time on projects to develop new features as opposed to defect resolution.

• Field teams were able to shorten sales cycles and close more business with the ability to easily access realistic data for external-facing activities including demoing and piloting solutions for prospects and customers.

Trifecta plans to expand its use of the Delphix platform by leveraging its data masking capabilities. It will also extend its use of virtualization to include file system data, allowing Trifecta teams to quickly provision full-stack environments that encompass both the database tier and the application file tier.