iManage Relies on Progress Chef SaaS to Achieve 66% Faster Application Delivery Time and Continuous Compliance

Trusted by more than one million professionals at 4,000 organizations around the world, iManage helps leading organizations manage documents and emails more efficiently, protect vital information assets, and leverage knowledge to drive better business outcomes through its award-winning AI-enabled technology. The company was developing a new cloud-native risk management solution designed to optimize business intake data, identify conflict of interest scenarios and promote compliance.

Senior Site Reliability Manager Tim Odom viewed this initiative as a greenfield project going into the cloud, requiring him and his team to manage the complete infrastructure configuration and application deployment of the new offering. As the team started customer rollouts, they quickly ran into issues.

A significant amount of host configurations needed to be handled, yet there was no installer for the new application and the team had defaulted to a manual process that was depleting their resources, preventing them from scaling the delivery to customers. “It took two people five days to complete an installation manually and we just couldn’t afford that,” said Odom.

iManage needed an infrastructure management solution that would automate configuration management and application delivery, while achieving Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) goals.

Odom, along with Larry Herz (a seasoned SRE expert and long-time colleague of Odom), both had extensive experience working with Progress^® Chef^® in the past. Based on their experience, they were convinced that Chef was the only solution robust enough to deliver on their expectations. In competition with just one other market solution, Chef stood out for its powerful infrastructure management within Azure, ease of implementation and operational compliance.

Further, Chef’s enterprise-grade infrastructure and automation management solution enabled the iManage team to handle the host-based configuration management automation at the scale and stability levels they needed, while simultaneously eliminating configuration drift.

A major requirement for the project's success was the ability to integrate the infrastructure with Microsoft Azure. While their existing solution had been satisfactory, it was not robust enough to manage the full automation of the new iManage application. “We needed configuration processes to be fully automated and that required a mature configuration management system we could trust,” added Odom.

The ease of implementation and domain-specific language of the Chef stack had everyone on board quickly and allowed them to standardize programming execution. “We more readily get what we want out of a Chef-run than any of the other technologies that are out there,” Herz said. He had a clear preference for the Chef code flow and simplicity, highlighting that as a defining factor in their decision to choose Chef. “The programming language is robust enough to do 99% of what we need done,” he added.