Paychex adopts agile development, speeds service delivery to customers

About the company

Paychex offers products that help clients of all sizes with payroll processing, record keeping, expense management, retirement services, insurance, and fully outsourced HR. The company pairs innovative technology with flexible digital services to create self-service tools for customers. To speed the creation and delivery of customer services, Paychex wanted to adopt collaborative DevOps and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices. Using Red Hat® solutions, Paychex achieved an average of 3-4 times more payroll product deployments.

Paychex’s in-house IT teams work together to create, test, launch, and update customer applications. However, development demands began to outpace the infrastructure team’s capacity. “A lot of our competitors are starting to offer disruptive online services,” said Dave Wilson, director of infrastructure and architecture at Paychex. “We also saw maturing technology that could be transformational for our customers, such as AI [artificial intelligence], chatbots, and natural-language processing. Our infrastructure teams recognized that they needed to help developers do more, higher-quality work to help us get to market faster.” Paychex sought new technology solutions to provide the necessary agile and cloud computing capabilities.

Open source technology offered an ideal solution for Paychex to establish an infrastructure platform for iterative collaboration. “Open source technology gives us the ability to deliver what our internal and external customers need in a way that differentiates us from our competitors,” said Wilson. The company used Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform as the core of its new infrastructure, along with other Red Hat products to manage repetitive tasks and unite infrastructure and application environments in a single, self-service hybrid cloud. Paychex also received training and ongoing technical support from its Red Hat Technical Account Manager.

Software and Services

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat OpenStack® Platform

Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform

Red Hat Enterprise Linux®

Red Hat Consulting

Red Hat Technical Account Management

Paychex’s agile transformation offers greater productivity for developers and operations staff, allowing them to take advantage of new DevOps practices and capabilities to deliver a proof of concept in days or hours—instead of 3 months. The company can now respond quicker to customer needs—and evolving industry regulations. “Our development teams using OpenShift have, on average, 3 or 4 times more product deployments, equating to more features to our end users faster,” said Wilson. Red Hat OpenShift also provides Paychex with portability across environments, a key component of the company’s multicloud strategy.