Green Rain partnership bolsters TORI Global's cloud transformation offering

Consulting firm TORI Global has joined the Green Rain partner programme of Fedr8, a company that specialises in leveraging machine learning to improve the effectiveness of cloud transitions. The consultancy has, meanwhile, successfully completed its first client engagement using the Green Rain system, at a financial services institution. 

With a team of 140 advisors, TORI Global is a consulting firm that provides strategy, organisation, controls and digital services to clients in the financial services sector. One of the services of the London-based consultancy* is supporting the business side of cloud transitions, as part of wider digital transformation agendas.

To improve its cloud offering to clients, TORI Global early this year partnered up with Fedr8. Farnborough-based Fedr8 has developed an approach which uses deep-dive source code analytics to improve the speed and quality of application migration to the cloud compared with traditional migration processes. The firm’s proprietary tool – Green Rain – improves the effectiveness of not just the initial migration from legacy applications, but also with continuous delivery of new application functionality, making it easier to maintain applications in the cloud than has been the case up to now. 

Commenting on the partnership with Green Rain, Costas Liassides, Head of TORI Global’s Digital Practice, said “The Green Rain solution automates application discovery, revolutionising how its customers leverage value across their custom application estates. The system ignites transformational change using machine learning to bring a deep understanding of application genetics into the enterprise arena, supporting customers in making decisions at speed, at scale, and with ever-improving efficiency.”

“Green Rain’s machine learning insights will assist TORI in offering a truly differentiated value-added service. Together we will help customers accelerate the performance and value of their custom application estate,” remarked Derek Ward, Executive Vice President at Fedr8. 

For their clients, which include retail and commercial banks, investment managers and insurance companies, TORI Global consultants will use Green Rain to help deliver the ‘forensic analysis’ that precedes complex cloud transitions, for projects such as PaaS adoption, cloud adoption and application modernisation. “In order to deliver trusted change programmes at speed and at scale we must look to automation that delivers accurate and complete results on demand. Green Rain helps us with just that in the cloud realm,” said Liassides. 

Green Rain in practice

Since signing the alliance in January this year, TORI Global has applied the system at one of its financial services clients, which had embarked on a programme to move a large proportion of its legacy application infrastructure into the  public cloud PaaS environment. “The company had seen considerable benefits when using their internal PaaS for new applications, they wanted to see those same benefits across their legacy estate,” said Dominic Yacoubian, TORI’s project manager at the helm of the engagement. Among the benefits highlighted in the business case is the reduction of the existing infrastructure and IaaS costs and speeding up the delivery of application-driven change.

Using Green Rain, TORI’s consultants were able to automate the discovery process, analysing the static source code of over 100 applications each day. “The data retrieved was used to better understand applications infrastructure and then as input for the transition plan to the new cloud-based environment.” Information was also used to define the rationalisation and harmonisation plan – a share of legacy applications were made redundant – as well as for streamlining bot business and IT processes. 

The tool’s machine learning capabilities provided a major efficiency boost to the programme, “instead of taking several man-weeks of effort, the time required for the analysis was reduced to a few dozens of machine-hours,” Yacoubian remarked. 

TORI Global is one Green Rain’s two services partners, the other being SystemsUp, a London-based IT consulting firm specialised in cloud transformations. Other partners of Green Rain include Red Hat and Pivotal (technology partners) and Amazon and Microsoft (cloud partners).

* TORI Global also has offices in New York, Dublin, Bangalore and Singapore.