A case study in digital transformation: The Davie Street Enterprises series

DSE digital transformation recap

February 18, 2022 • Global Partner Solution and Technology ISV Team

A great deal of IT updates has happened at Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) over the last year.  The company’s digital transformation champions have all helped innovate and modernize the different aspects of their IT infrastructure. They’ve utilized the latest technology for adopting a hybrid cloud strategy that is safer, scalable, efficient, and enables modern application development practices.

DSE did this through not one but many different technology providers—an entire ecosystem of independent software vendors (ISVs) with Red Hat’s software at the center. Next-generation application development, security, AI/ML, edge, application migration, and observability were all focus areas in the company’s journey. Here’s a sampling of everything it accomplished!

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises embraces cloud technologies and services​

December 17, 2021 • Vincent Power

Throughout our fictional case study of Davie Street Enterprises (DSE), we have witnessed how embracing modern tech industry best practices have drastically increased the speed at which the company can accomplish its goals while improving overall operational efficiency. 

DSE has done this by finding platforms, services, and processes that best align with its goals—made possible by the combination of Red Hat products and our partner ecosystem. In this post, we will focus on those operational efficiencies and how they can be further enhanced through the use of Red Hat Cloud Services, all of which are built on Red Hat OpenShift.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises becomes an AI company​

December 3, 2021 • John Senegal

DSE is a traditional company structured hierarchically and divided into multiple business units and IT departments. Introducing new technologies can sometimes be challenging, especially something as daunting as artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML).  

This article will look into how the previous project and a whole new set of problems will transform DSE into an AI company. It will explore the lessons learned both technically and organizationally. It will also show how the lessons learned powered solving new problems using AI.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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DSE measures and improves DevOps

November 5, 2021 • Dave Meurer, Phillip Lamb

Newly-promoted Director of Security Engineering Zachary L. Tureaud knew that Monique Wallace, Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) CIO, was impressed with the work he had led on solution design, but he still needed to ensure his DevSecOps vision was working. It wasn’t enough to just point to all the new tooling his team had put together. 

He needed to be able to demonstrate, quantifiably, that the changes were having the desired effect. Let’s see how he led DSE toward a DevSecOps practice using measured approaches from Google’s DevOps research and assessment team.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises’ DevSecOps journey to the hybrid cloud

October 22, 2021 • Dave Meurer

Davie Street Enterprises, our fictional Red Hat customer that is working its way through real-world digital transformation problems, is automating DevSecOps tooling across their hybrid cloud infrastructure using Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management.

Ok, let’s see it for real.

Last we saw Zachary L. Tureaud, he was in the early days of his promotion by Monique Wallace to lead Davie Street Enterprises' (DSE’s) shift towards DevSecOps. Tureaud laid out a comprehensive DevSecOps solution that includes Red Hat and its security partner ecosystem and is designed to shift security left in the DevOps life cycle. His goal is to not let security slow DSE’s application delivery down. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises leaps into Industry 4.0 with edge technologies

October 6, 2021 • John Senegal

Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) has automated a large part of its IT infrastructure and has completely revamped its development processes using DevSecOps. It has also rebuilt the Parts and Supply (PAS) system to allow for more efficient supply chain management. With these successes behind it, DSE is feeling a little more confident in its plans to transform the company. 

However, it looks ahead soberly and sees some very big challenges in modernizing its warehouse operations and is not sure how to address them. In this post, we’ll share how DSE plans to add predictive maintenance capabilities with Red Hat and an ecosystem of vendors, and begin its path toward Industry 4.0.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Using NGINX Ingress Controller on Red Hat OpenShift

September 15, 2021 • Cameron Skidmore

Network engineering for the high availability of application services is nothing new. However, as Kubernetes-based environments become more widespread, companies are beginning to look for innovative deployments across multiple types of infrastructures (on-premise, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud). They then begin to ask what achieving successful application delivery looks like for those types of deployments. 

In this post, we’ll cover how Gloria Fenderson, DSE’s Senior Manager of Network Engineering, plans to use Red Hat OpenShift and the NGINX Ingress Controller to deliver applications on a cluster running across multiple types of underlying infrastructure. Both NGINX and Red Hat solutions are designed to enable the deployment of container-based environments across multiple clouds; we'll see now how easily this is accomplished.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Use automated snapshots to defend against ransomware with NetApp and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform​

August 12, 2021 • George James

Ransomware is a particularly nefarious form of malware that encrypts its victim’s data with the promise of decryption once a ransom is paid. Attacks are on the rise and can have devastating effects. 

During one of the security audits, DSE discovered that it did not have a cohesive strategy to recover from a ransomware attack.

In this post, we’ll see how Zachary L. Tureaud, DSE’s Director of Security Engineering, plans to use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ONTAP Snapshot technology to prevent and react to ransomware attacks. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Expanding automation to Windows environments with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Chocolatey

July 14, 2021 • David Rojas

Over the last few months Randy Lu, a Senior System Administrator at Davie Street Enterprises, has heard about the major leaps many teams have taken during the company’s digital transformation, yet he hasn’t seen any changes in his area. At first, he was content with no one messing with how he runs his Windows nodes. 

However, after hearing his peers in the network and development area bragging about all the new technologies they are using, Lu is upset no one has spoken to him about modernizing his area. Today he decides to demand an explanation. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises transforms its applications with Red Hat

June 10, 2021 • John Senegal

Davie Street Enterprises recognizes that its way of doing business must change. Business today is done through processes that have been built at the company's inception, along with the tools that support those processes. 

DSE's current application set is typical of an organization in the manufacturing industry. For this industry, inventory management or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are perhaps the most critical. We examine the company’s transformation of its ERP system, called Parts and Supplies (PAS), and the software tools that support it. Daniel Mitchell, the Chief Architect at DSE, will be leading this effort, addressing critical decisions (like build or buy) to support a successful transformation.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Installing and using Dynatrace to prevent outages

May 20, 2021 • David Rojas

Over the past several months Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) digital transformation has progressed quickly with much success. Now it's time to tackle predicting and preventing, if possible, outages and improving user experience.

Ranbir Ahuja, Senior Director of Operators, has been following the efforts with much curiosity. For the most part, Ahuja is excited at the progress yet is concerned that from his perspective one of the largest single drivers for this transformation hasn’t been directly addressed. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Shifting left: Davie Street Enterprises implements DevSecOps

April 1, 2021 • Dave Meurer

Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) continues its digital transformation journey. After transforming the culture, standardizing and automating the IT infrastructure, deploying a middleware strategy, and deploying its cloud strategy, DSE is beginning to shift towards DevOps. This is where DSE can leverage the cultural changes implemented within its development and operations teams to release features faster than the competition, using container technology.

To launch DevOps into production, DSE is holding itself accountable for ensuring security is integrated into the culture and process.  Security has been the top priority for DSE ever since its 2020 website outage, which involved a security breach among other factors.  Security has now almost grinded DSE’s traditional development cycles to a halt, so this transformation over to DevOps couldn’t have come at a better time. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises embraces GitOps with GitLab

March 18, 2021 • Phillip Lamb

In this installment, we'll take a look at DSE's journey to GitOps through the eyes of Andres Martinez, Principal Developer. Martinez has crafted a plan to modernize the DSE inventory application.

Of course, revamping the entire application stack would take way more time and money than they had available. The increasing fragility of the application environments meant his team spends almost all of their time just keeping the lights on. He realizes that he doesn’t have to modernize everything at once, but he needs to start somewhere. It’s a question with - for once - an easy answer: they need to modernize their version control in the same way the operations team has modernized its version control.

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Automation of BIG-IP with Red Hat Ansible Automation and F5

February 17, 2021 • Cameron Skidmore

In part three of our Davie Street Enterprises (DSE) series, we're going to take a look at how DSE addressed some of its network issues that led to a major outage.

DSE Chief Architect Daniel Mitchell has been put in charge of Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) digital transformation. He's feeling pressure from management since the website crashed last month, and was down for 46 hours straight. Shifting from one-off configurations and into an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) model is now critical for DSE. It took a crisis, but management realized that procrastinating isn’t an option and have tasked Mitchell to lead various teams to modernize their infrastructure. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Automating IP Address Management with Red Hat Ansible and Infoblox

February 4, 2021 • George James

DSE, a leading provider of widgets, has many large manufacturing plants around the world. Traditionally, each plant’s local IT staff was in charge of its own operations, with little oversight from corporate IT. As the company grew, each plant became its own de-facto data center. Early attempts at connecting them over a wide area network (WAN) produced mixed results. 

In one instance, an IP address overlap combined with a misconfigured load balancer caused an outage with an inventory tracking system. This took almost two days to resolve and cost the company more than $100,000 in lost revenue. As a result, the WAN deployment was delayed and eventually scaled back. This also contributed to delays in migrating services to the cloud. 

Read the full post on the Red Hat Blog. >>

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Davie Street Enterprises: A case study in digital transformation

January 18, 2021 • David Rojas

We would like to introduce you to Davie Street Enterprises (DSE). DSE is a fictitious 100-year-old multinational corporation that is beginning its digital transformation journey. In this post we will lay the groundwork for a series following DSE as an illustration of how some Red Hat customers are preparing for and succeeding at digital transformation to save money, become more efficient, and compete more effectively.

The company isn't real, but its struggle is very real for many organizations. Throughout this series, we will explore the business problems any number of organizations are challenged with and how DSE, with the help of Red Hat and its partners, plan to solve those problems. To start, let’s learn more about DSE, its business, and some of the associates involved in its digital transformation journey. 

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Davie Street Enterprises employees and their roles

Name	Title	Description
Susan Chin	Sr. Director Development	Susan is new to DSE (1 year) and was brought on after her predecessor was fired after the development team failed to release the updated website on time and when they did it crashed for 46 hours causing the company almost 1 million in lost sales. Her primary charter is to change how the development team functions and endure failures like this never occur again. She is under tremendous pressure to correct the ship ASAP without adding cost.
Andres Martinez	Principal Developer	Andres has been working at DSE for 14 years and has seen it at its best and worst. He is the primary developer on the company website. He is overworked and many projects rely on his expert knowledge. He is on the verge of quitting as the pressure and workload seems unsurmountable. Andres reports directly to Susan due to the critical work he does
Daniel Mitchell	Chief Architect	Daniel is new to DSE. He was hired as part of a larger effort to modernize the staff starting with certain key positions. He comes from a fairly small startup with some very creative ideas but knows he will have to be able to scale those ideas as well as show ROI on them fast.
Stephanie Wilson	Director of Plant Operations	Stephanie has witnessed incredible growth in her 31 years at DSE; her plants can't keep up with demand. The order system is outdated and fails often, causing delays delivering Widgets. She is concerned about Virtual Widgets' impact on her operations.
Ranbir Ahuja	Sr. Director IT Operations	Ranbir has been at DSE for 7 years. When he started he came in super excited about modernizing IT Operations at DSE but after many attempts that have failed due to poor choices in solutions and lack of planning he has become very disillusioned. He has many promising ideas but hasn’t found the right combination of toolset and partner to carry this out. When the website crashed for 46 hours even though it ended up being an issue with the code  as well as a lack of proper load balancing there was a lot of finger pointing directed at operations. He never wants his teams to be in that position again.
Dan Johnson	Sr. Director of Sales	Dan started just a few weeks ago and was brought on board due to his experience building sales campaigns around virtual products. He has new and innovative ideas but already seeing that selling those ideas at DSE will not be easy. He is chartered to increase sales by 18% in the first year. Doing that alone with the legacy products and associated application is impossible and he is growing impatient at the lack of progress on the Virtual Widgets.
Monique Wallace	CIO	Monique was recently promoted to CIO from the COO position she held for 12 years. Overall she has been at DSE for 34 years and knows it like the back of her hand. She has a strong development background from earlier in her career. The CEO has made it clear that she needs to cut costs, improve operational efficiencies through technology and deliver on the promise of Virtual Widgets. One of her biggest challenges has been aligning IT Operations, Plant Operations, and Development to work together on this goal.
Gloria Fenderson	Sr. Manager of Network Engineering	Gloria has been at DSE for over 18 years and spent 15 of them as a network engineer. She knows the pains an engineer suffers and what it takes to keep a network up and running. She also knows what doesn’t work. As she was promoted into a management role she was intent on changing how networking is done but lately has been feeling like giving up.
Zachary L. Tureaud	Director of Security Engineering	Zachary has been at DSE for 5 years and spent all of his time on the Security Operations team responsible for threat detection and remediation.  A rising rock star performer at DSE, Zachary was the obvious choice to be offered a new role at DSE as Director of Security Engineering to ensure Security is part of the very fabric of DSE’s new DevOps culture change.
Randy Lu	Senior System Administrator	Randy has been working at DSE for more than 30 years. In fact, he was part of the team that installed the set of PC’s all running Windows 95. He has worked in system administration for most of his career and is very set in his ways. He knows more about DSE’s Windows environment than anyone in the company. He doesn’t like change and wants things to be easy or he will fight the process.