Introduction
CoreLogic delivers unique property-level insights that power the global real estate economy. Through superior data and data enabled solutions including comprehensive property information, real estate transaction services, and analytics for mortgage lenders and servicers, capital market investors, and real estate sales professionals. The company combines publicly available data and multiple listing services (MLS) data with its own property, mortgage and financial databases to provide information required for mortgage and real estate financing.
Today, the CoreLogic cloud-based loan origination and asset management platforms offer flexible, convenient, and secure on-demand services for clients. Over a million users currently rely on data-driven insights and other services from CoreLogic through its industry leading applications and workflow tools.
According to Richard Leurig, Senior Vice President for Innovation Development at CoreLogic, “CoreLogic is unique because the company has a very deep set of data around property characteristics, consumers, and borrowers. We take that data and put analytics on top of it. And because of the wealth of information that we have, we can offer products and services that our competitors can’t deliver.”
Challenges
Improving competitiveness and time to market of new products and services
Software is the primary means by which CoreLogic delivers products to clients. Millions of professional users rely on the resilience of CoreLogic products and about 80 percent of their applications are considered mission critical.
The company wanted to move towards more standardization and drive more revenue and client engagement through a different way of using its software and data. But disparate systems that were the result of mergers, acquisitions, and historical purchasing decisions made it challenging to develop new applications that are scalable, modular, and ubiquitously accessible from different devices, such as mobile, voice, and desktop computers.
Solution
Recognizing that today’s technologies and methodologies are radically different from the past, CoreLogic began by adopting a new software development methodology and a cloud-native approach of everything-as-a-service. The company formed the Innovation Development Center as part of its Technology Transformation Initiative to be a primary center for innovation and agile development for its next generation of technology.
The core design tenets identified by CoreLogic required that the platform components be independently upgradeable from its applications, enabled by standard technologies, and available as reusable and highly elastic services. They also desired a consistent and automated software development lifecycle for improved developer productivity and lowered learning curve across projects.
In 2014, CoreLogic worked with Pivotal Labs and chose the Pivotal Cloud Foundry Cloud-Native Platform to develop several new applications in the multifamily and mortgage lending space such as Condosafe™, LoanSafe Connect™ and Leasing Manager™.
“Without 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. Being that we are a data and information and analytics company, partnering with Pivotal with its very strong data science and data technology capabilities is very important to us,” says Leurig. “We look at Pivotal from a 360-degree view because our relationship touches on each area of how we do technology and product delivery.”
CoreLogic brought software engineers to Pivotal Labs to learn Pivotal’s extreme agile software development methodology. The methodology focuses on test-driven development, pair programming, short development cycles, and continuous verification and integration of code to improve software quality and flexibility and reduce cost. As a result, the culture of CoreLogic product management and technology groups has fundamentally changed to become more nimble and collaborative.
“For us, it’s been much more than a technological transformation moving to a (Cloud-Native Platform). It’s a new way to develop products,” says Leurig. “It’s the most exciting thing we’ve done in the last 12 months.”
Benefits
A robust, agile environment that focuses on creating the best product for CoreLogic clients
“By working with Pivotal, our clients now look at us as industry-leading experts and much more of a technologically innovative company than they had in the past.” They always knew we had great analytics, data and products,” says Leurig. “But now, clients see us as having great data and analytics delivered by a great technological process.”
Previously, software projects took a long time, often delayed, and were also very costly. At times, the projects didn’t always deliver what external clients wanted or even what CoreLogic product management teams desired.
Now, with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and extreme agile software development methodology, CoreLogic developers are taking advantage of test-driven development, pair programming, and short development cycles. While the new methodology has definitely yielded critical software development benefits, equally as important is the fact that every person at CoreLogic who has interacted with experts at Pivotal Labs has been challenged to leave behind old beliefs and development paradigms.
“Pivotal has been instrumental in challenging CoreLogic’s norms and creating a robust environment focused on agility and a quicker time to market,” says Leurig. “We’re encouraged to focus on one goal – creating the best product for the client.”
Faster Time to Market for differentiated and new technology solutions
When planning the first product developed on Pivotal Cloud Foundry, CoreLogic allocated a team of 12 engineers with four quality assurance software engineers and a management team. The goal was to deliver the product in 14 months. Instead, the project ultimately required only a product manager, one user experience designer and six engineers who delivered the desired product in just six months.
“Some people doubted that Pivotal’s methodology would work, but we’ve actually shown that it resulted in a faster time to market at less cost,” observes Leurig.
Provided the ability to run on multiple infrastructures as a service (IaaS)
An important new focus for CoreLogic is to explore hybrid cloud for cost and elasticity advantages. Because Cloud Foundry provides a consistent model for deploying and running applications across multiple clouds, it gives CoreLogic the ability to make their application “Multi-Cloud-compatible” by allowing the company to write its application once, and as needs change, deploy it to another Cloud Foundry instance; public or private.
In fact, one of the first collaborations with Pivotal Labs was developed on a public instance of Cloud Foundry operated by Pivotal and then moved to the CoreLogic data center to satisfy compliance requirements without the need to change the application.
“Our first application, CondoSafe, we developed in the Pivotal Web Services environment and then we moved it over without changing the application” says Leurig.
Conclusion
CoreLogic executives knew that working with Pivotal would enable CoreLogic to develop products faster, but equally as critical is that the entire company has now adopted a new way of engaging with clients, embracing innovation, and developing new products.
Leurig reports that by partnering with Pivotal, CoreLogic employees learned to use a discovery and framing process to kick off every project. Now, CoreLogic developers meet with clients, and employees to find out how they use products, what personas they have, and their workflows. This information is brought back to design better products for all of CoreLogic.
In the future, the company intends to partner with Pivotal to develop an entire value chain solution through a new portal developed by CoreLogic that will provide clients with an end-to-end seamless experience with CoreLogic delivering all products, all data, analytics through a similar experience.
“When working with Pivotal, you have to be open to constant challenges to the norms and paradigms that you’ve lived with in the past,” observes Leurig. “Pivotal opened our eyes to a different cultural way of doing things and a better way of delivering our products.”
