Broadband, digital TV, mobile and phone (quadplay) provider Virgin Media has recently embarked on an application management programme that it hopes will improve its ability to react to changes in the market.

It has deployed BMC's BladeLogic Application Release Manager (ARM) package to provide automatic updates to its mobile web service applications.

Virgin Media mobile delivery build and environment manager Matt Wills said the firm's mobile delivery channel is made up of about 52 separate application components across its datacentre infrastructure.

"We have all sorts of platforms to support, from Solaris and Linux to Windows, with a bit of HP-UX thrown in for good measure," said Wills.

Before using BladeLogic ARM, the process used by Wills' team to update these mobile applications was essentially a manual one, which resulted in long lead times for launching new or adapted services, and uncertain service quality when applications went into production.

The process for getting an application into production starts with the initial development of application components followed by testing.

"We have quite a lot of Java-based applications that provide our mobile services – they all do slightly different things, but from a deployment perspective, they're all exactly the same - it's just a bunch of Java code, just a bunch of configuration data," said Wills.

After the development and testing stages comes the production deployment, which again was a time-consuming and error-prone manual process, according to Wills.

"Each one of these components contains tens of different environment configurations, like passwords, URLs, user accounts etc – stuff that would have to be physically typed in," he added.

In one case, while copying and pasting some configuration data out in a spreadsheet, one team member erroneously included a space in a URL, resulting in the application code not recognising the URL as valid. "It took us days to work out what the problem was," said Wills.

Before deploying BladeLogic, it took 30 minutes to deploy each configuration for a web service and 90 minutes to build the service on an application server. After the BladeLogic rollout, web service deployment time was six minutes and the time required to build the service on an application server was three minutes.

As a result, the application update cycle has significantly shortened, potentially allowing Virgin Media to bring new offerings to the market far quicker.

In the continuing battle to reduce customer churn, being able to react fast and roll out new services quickly is a key asset, and for the future, Virgin Media says that up to 90 per cent of applications in the company’s mobile delivery channel will use BMC BladeLogic. As firms are being pushed to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), Virgin Media is also evaluating BladeLogic to automate the system-level and system-wide configuration changes required to ensure PCI compliance.