background
Alstom has established itself in France as the reference in terms of urban, regional and main line rail transport. Alstom is a pillar of the railway industrial sector in France, a major partner of agglomerations, French regions, and operators such as SNCF or RATP.
Until then, we had references scattered between the different branches of the group that gave a fragmented view of the information system. (...) We were looking for a simple, fast, agile and inexpensive development solution. That is the case. The result is an evolving tool, shared by all. Today, it is our best tool for delineating the merging of IT with General Electric and for the separation of Alstom Transport.
Jean-Marc Jaillet
Global Enterprise Architect, CIO Alstom
Challenges
The Alstom Group's IT Department, and more particularly the IT Architecture and Urbanization Department, wanted to create a single global repository to manage its assets, which represent 50 datacenters, 4,000 applications, 4,000 applications, 10,000 applications, 10,000 servers, 10,000 servers, 90,000 users and more than 100,000 licenses. In addition, this need for complete control of the IS was made a high priority in the context of the acquisition of Alstom's Energy branch by General Electric since it was very quickly necessary to be in a position to “separate” the Transport Information System from the Energy Information System.
Objectives
With Simplicité, you design a data model. You simply create objects that you connect to each other. For example, you graphically link a server object to an environment, i.e. a prod, pre-prod machine, etc. You draw the data model in the tool and it generates all the data entry HMIs for you. We thought it was an excellent idea. The construction of the model is almost entirely graphical and then the generation of the screens is automatic. On the rights management side, there is no development to do if you want to.
Laurent Giraud
Enterprise Chief Architect, CIO Alstom
Establishing the single and centralized IS repository on the basis of IS standards dispersed between the various branches of the group
Streamline IT costs (applications, infrastructure) and increase ITSM efficiency
Take advantage of this framework to address license management (SAM — Software Asset Management)
Set up a DevOps solution that is fast, at controlled costs and scalable.
Solutions
Modeling the IT group and creating the repository in Simplicité
“Full cloud” architecture (private)
Development in agile mode by successive iterations
Interconnection with a Big Data tool allowing to have a complete and extremely detailed view of all the IS and its use (“parsing” of server logs)
By 2025, almost three quarters of new applications developed by companies will use low-code (compared to 25% in 2020). Source Forester
