CoreLogic is an industry leading, $1.4 billion-company that provides data and analytics for property and related financial services. Its database encompasses 3.5 billion records, including property records, mortgage applications, and historical transaction data, and their analytics applications predict performance, perform pattern recognition, monitor portfolios, gauge trends, and detect risk.
A year into its partnership with Pivotal, it is seeing it’s software development transformation goals realized. CoreLogic deployed Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s Cloud-Native platform to provide the foundation for application deployment and worked with Pivotal Labs to open its own software development lab. With these elements in place, it now has an agile development environment and culture. These provide speed to market while providing the flexibility to run on many infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms.
“By working with Pivotal, our clients now look at us as industry-leading technology experts and much more of a technologically innovative company than they had in the past,” said Richard Leurig, senior vice president of the CoreLogic Innovation Development Center. “Clients see us as having great data and analytics delivered by a great technological process. Without Pivotal Cloud Foundry underlying what we are doing, a lot of the things we have been able to do in the last year would not have been possible.”
Pivotal Cloud Foundry has helped CoreLogic transform to a cloud-native enterprise. At a high level, the company wanted to drive more revenue, improve competitiveness, and minimize the time to market for new data services and software products. As a data and analytics company, its application portfolio provides unique data insights for the global real estate economy. The company has the most-comprehensive property information apps, real estate transaction services, and analytical tools for mortgage lenders and servicers, capital market investors, and real estate sales professionals. For example, cloud-based loan origination and asset management products offer convenient and secure on-demand services and tools to more than one million users.
All of the services are delivered via software, and the majority of applications—80 percent—are considered mission-critical. Past mergers, acquisitions, and purchasing decisions led to a mass of disparate systems, and CoreLogic faced a challenge—they needed greater standardization and an easier way to drive more revenue and customer engagement. To accomplish these goals, the company needed to develop scalable, modular, and all-device accessible applications on a standard platform—this became Pivotal Cloud Foundry (see their lessons learned from Cloud Foundry Summit after a year on the platform).
In addition to adopting a Pivotal application development platform, CoreLogic adopted a new software development methodology and a cloud-native approach of everything-as-a-service. It formed the Innovation Development Center to focus on innovation and agile development. In the first phase of using Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the company developed several new applications in the multifamily and mortgage lending space, such as Condosafe™, LoanSafe Connect™, and Leasing Manager™.
CoreLogic brought software engineers to Pivotal Labs to learn extreme, agile software development methodologies, which focuses on test-driven development, pair programming, short development cycles, and continuous verification and integration of code to improve software deployment cycles, software quality, and business flexibility while reducing cost and risk.
“It’s a new way to develop products,” Leurig said. “It’s the most exciting thing we’ve done in the last 12 months. … Our relationship [with Pivotal] touches on each area of how we do technology and product delivery.”
With the new platform and an emerging, agile culture, CoreLogic is moving past its historical habit of delivering software months after a key launch date while often missing critical features. The new methodology has yielded many software development benefits while challenging CoreLogic’s status quo, directing teams to operate like a world-class software development organization. Now, software is built and deployed in half the time as before and sometimes even faster.
As the future unfolds, CoreLogic is exploring hybrid cloud architectures for cost and elasticity advantages, and the team is relying on Pivotal Cloud Foundry’s ability to run on multiple infrastructures-as-a-service (IaaS). By abstracting the development platform from the underlying infrastructure, the company can make its applications “multi-cloud-compatible.” This will allow CoreLogic to truly write an application once, and as needs change, deploy it to another Cloud Foundry instance on a public or private cloud.
In the future, the company intends to partner with Pivotal to develop an entire value chain solution through a new portal. This will provide clients with an end-to-end seamless experience with its products, data, and analytics. At the end of the day, principles, processes, culture, and technology has come together to help CoreLogic transform.
“Pivotal opened our eyes to a different cultural way of doing things and a better way of delivering our products,” Leurig said.
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