Delphix Helps Gain Capital Reduce Dev Cycle Times By 75% And Increase Business Output By 20%

Gain Capital is a world leader in spread betting and “contracts for difference” (CFD) trading. Established in the UK in 1983, they have grown to become one of the leading providers of contracts for derivatives trading over the past 30 years.

Challenge

The Gain Capital technology team was focused on continuous improvement, with a long-term goal of increasing IT’s value to the business. Development teams needed to get software from development into production as efficiently as possible via continuous integration, automated testing, and fast environment spin-up.

However, one factor was holding things back—data. Application teams worked on up to eight projects simultaneously, but delivering data environments for a single project took up to four hours. Multiplied over eight projects with regular environment refreshes, it was clear that data had become a key development bottleneck.

When fresh production data copies were required, development cycles were very long and demanded careful coordination between teams. Gain Capital found itself having to sacrifice or delay new, innovative projects in order to prevent delivery rates from slipping.

Solution

Gain Capital turned to Delphix for a solution, using the Delphix data platform to virtualize, govern, and deliver data for applications based on SQL Server. The project commenced with a three month proof of concept, which demonstrated immediate results. Gain Capital then deployed Delphix across their entire IT organization with the full implementation completed in only one month.

Results

Gain Capital realized benefits in the agility of their IT operations teams that, ultimately, translated into faster application development and greater value to the business: 

• The time taken to create database copies was reduced from four hours to just three minutes.

• Over thirty developers now access data via a self-service model, without requiring involvement from database or storage administrators.

• Project times are dramatically shorter; in one case, a complex application archiving process was rolled out in six weeks rather than the planned period of six months.

• Faster data delivery increased environment utilization, allowing Gain Capital to remove QA environments and lower infrastructure costs.