The search for Australia's CIO of the year

Ian Gibson - CIO SuperChoice and customer of Offis speaks at the Awards panel session about infrastructure strategy.

The hard June 30 deadline for compliance with the government’s new SuperStream superannuation system gave SuperChoice no choice but to address its constrained IT environment - which it freely admits was near breaking point.

But instead of simply meeting its obligations, the company decided to go the whole hog and entirely rewrite its core legacy platform into a microservices architecture and deploy it into a multi-public cloud environment, alongside a complete overhaul of its development practices.

It turned from minimal dev and test environments and expensive and slow provisioning (taking ten or more weeks) into spinning up new virtual environments in under an hour, thanks to a cultural overhaul to agile and DevOps practices, and by growing the IT team by almost 400 percent.

It is now paying far less operational costs annually and has drastically reduced deployment errors, while bringing in new revenue from moving away from a single user acceptance testing environment for all clients to dedicated environments for individual firms.