Case Study: How a Global Telecom Leader Streamlined Test Environment Management with Poolycado
Company Overview: A Global Telecommunications Leader
A global leader in telecommunications technology and services, the company provides essential infrastructure, software, and services to mobile and fixed network operators, as well as other industries. With a strong focus on innovation, the company is at the forefront of 5G deployment, the Internet of Things (IoT), and emerging digital services. Their solutions connect billions of people, enabling societies to advance and industries to transform. For decades, the company's technology has been the backbone of communication networks worldwide, empowering a fully connected world and driving new opportunities for businesses and individuals alike.
The Challenge: Overcoming Resource Bottlenecks
At a global telecommunications leader, a team responsible for a critical network management product relied on a limited pool of virtual machines for their testing platform. These essential resources were shared between the automated continuous integration (CI) pipeline and a team of approximately 100 developers and testers. Due to cost and capacity constraints, the number of virtual machines was finite, creating a significant bottleneck.
The existing workflow was inefficient. Team members would book a resource, perform their tests, and were expected to release it promptly. However, this manual process led to resource "hoarding." Fearing a lack of availability, users would often hold onto machines for far longer than necessary—sometimes for weeks—or simply forget to release them. This created artificial scarcity, blocked other users, and slowed down development and testing cycles.
The Search for a Solution: Build vs. Buy
The team's initial attempt to manage this was through the Jenkins Lockable Resources plugin. However, this tool proved to be a primitive solution. It offered poor performance, had limited queuing capabilities, and suffered from a slow and cumbersome user interface, frustrating the 100-person team that depended on it.
Recognizing the inadequacy of the plugin, the company's management added the development of a custom, in-house resource management tool to their product backlog. The project was estimated to require six developers and a six-month timeline, translating to half a million euros - just for the initial development, excluding the maintenance costs. However, before committing to this significant investment, they searched for a ready-made solution. The choice became clear when they discovered Poolycado. An annual license for Poolycado presented a dramatically more cost-effective and immediate alternative to the expensive and time-consuming internal project.
The Solution: A Seamless Transition to Poolycado
From the first sales meeting, the team was highly impressed. Poolycado was a mature product that met all of their functional criteria for a robust resource management and reservation system.
The implementation process was remarkably swift and smooth, taking just two weeks to go live. An Poolycado deployment engineer provided hands-on support, working collaboratively with the client's team to manage the entire setup. This included the initial installation, configuring authentication, and importing the first set of resource data into the platform.
Results and Future Plans
With Poolycado, the company has successfully resolved its resource contention issues. The clear, user-friendly interface has eliminated resource hoarding and provides full visibility into the availability and booking status of the test environments.
The success of the initial implementation has inspired the company to look at the bigger picture. The team is already planning to expand its use of Poolycado to manage other types of engineering and lab resources beyond the initial set of virtual machines, bringing new levels of efficiency to other departments.
Advice for Other Organizations
When asked for advice for other teams facing similar challenges, the team had a clear recommendation: invest in external expertise for implementation. They highlighted the value of having dedicated support for critical setup tasks like configuration, testing, and data migration, which was key to their rapid and successful deployment of Poolycado.
