Transcript of a BreifingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover 2011 show in Las Vegas on how payroll and HR services provider Paychex gains benefit from application development tools.

1. Case Study: Paychex Leverages HP Tools to Streamline and
Automate Application Development
Transcript of a BreifingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover 2011 show in Las Vegas on how
payroll and HR services provider Paychex gains benefit from application development tools.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the Discover show floor this
week, the week of June 6, to explore some major enterprise IT solution trends and innovations
making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your
host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.
[Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Our use case study today focuses on Paychex. It’s a large provider of
services to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and is growing
rapidly around HR, payroll, and increased benefits, tax payments, and quite a few others.
We're here with Joel Karczewski, the Director of IT at Paychex, to learn about how automation
and efficiency is changing the game in how they develop and deploy their applications.
Welcome.
Joel Karczewski: Good to be here today, Dana.
Gardner: First, Joel, do you have a philosophy about application development, and has it shifted
over the past few years?
Karczewski: Yes, we do. Over the past few years, IT has been asked to deliver more quickly, to
be more responsive to our business needs, and to help drive down costs in the way in which we
develop, deploy, and deliver software and services to our end customers.
To accomplish that, we've been focusing on automating many of the tasks in a traditional
software development lifecycle as much as possible to help make sure that when they're
performed manually, they're not skipped.
For example, automating from a source code check in, automating the process by which we
would close out defects, that source code was resolving, automating the testing that we do when
we create a new service, automating the performance testing, automating the unit testing, the
code coverage, the security testing, to make sure that we're not introducing key flaws or
vulnerabilities that might be exposed to our external customers.

2. Gardner: Tell us a bit more about Paychex. I probably didn’t do it justice, but tell me the extent
of your business and also how many applications you're dealing with?
Karczewski: That’s a great question. Applications are basically just a combination of integrated
services, and we've been moving forward with a strategic service-based delivery model for
approximately a year and a half now. We have hundreds of services that are reused and utilized
by our applications.
Payroll provider
Paychex is primarily an HR benefits and payroll provider, and our key customers are
approximately 570,000 business owners and the employees that work for those business owners.
Gardner: And are they typically small businesses?
Karczewski: Small to medium. We've been focusing on the small-business
owner because we believe that’s where our specialty is.
Gardner: And, automation for your customers is super important. In order
for you to extend automation to them, you have to have applications that are
perform well and are well-tested. Tell me why a services orientation and
services delivery model is so important in your particular business.
Karczewski: We used to have customers that existed on one end of the
spectrum or the other. For example, there’s the customer who wants to come
to the website and do everything for himself or herself, a website with a minimal interaction with
a specialist that we may have working at one of our 90-plus branches across the United States.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the type of customer that wants Paychex to do
everything for them. They don’t want to do anything themselves.
What we have been finding over time is that we're developing a hybrid behavioral approach. We
have clients who want Paychex to do some of the business tasks for them, but they want to still
do some of the tasks themselves.
In order to satisfy the one end of the spectrum or the other and everything in between, we've
been moving towards a service-based strategy where we can package, bundle, price, roll out, and
deliver the set of services that fit the needs of that client in a very highly personalized and
customized fashion.
Gardner: It also sounds like, being in the payroll business, you're dealing with integrations
across multiple organizations and financial institutions, and therefore your applications are not
just in a certain silo and operating inside your four walls, but you really have to interact across
dynamic and extended environment. Therefore, I should think testing, regression testing, and
performance management is super important.

3. Karczewski: That’s correct. The more that we can automate, the more we're able to test those
services in the various combinations and environments with which they need to perform, with
which they need to be highly available, and with which they need to be consistent.
Gardner: How about data? I should think that this is fairly sensitive data too. We're talking
about people’s paychecks, their benefits, and so forth.
Personal information
Karczewski: We have an awful lot of information that is very personal and highly confidential.
For example, think about the employees that work for one of these 560,000-plus business
owners. We know when they are planning to retire. We know when they move, because they are
changing their addresses. We know when they get married. We know when they have a child. We
know an awful lot of information about them, including where they bank, and it’s highly, highly
confidential information.
Gardner: I have a good sense now of some of your requirements, the fact that you
have got many applications, you're services oriented, and you've got these
important requirements around performance, security, privacy, and so forth.
How did you come at the solution to being able to produce, deliver, and
maintain applications with these requirements satisfied?
Karczewski: We took a step back and took a look at our software delivery
lifecycle. We looked at areas that are potentially not as value-add, areas of our software delivery
lifecycle that would cause an individual developer, a tester, or a project manager, to be manually
taking care of tasks with which they are not that familiar.
For example, a developer knows how to write software. A developer doesn’t always know how
to exercise our quality center or our defect tracking system, changing the ownership, changing
statuses, and updating multiple repositories just to get his or her work done.
So, we took a look at tasks that cause latency in our software delivery lifecycle and we focused
on automating those tasks.
Gardner: It sounds like you're also quite comfortable with software as a service (SaaS) and on-
premises. Is that the case? Are you a hybrid consumer of application lifecycle management
services?
Karczewski: Yes, and we're moving more into that space on a daily basis.
Gardner: Tell me specifically what HP products you're using and which ones you have in your
sights for some future development and testing?

4. Karczewski: We're using a host of HP products today. For example, in order to achieve
automated functional testing, we're utilizing Quality Center (QC) in combination with Quick Test
Professional (QTP). In order to do our performance testing, pre-production, we utilize. Post-
production, we're beginning to look an awful lot at Real Use Monitor (RUM), and we're looking
to interface RUM with ArcSight, so that when we do have an availability issue, and it is a
performance issue for one of our users anywhere, utilizing our services, we're able to identify it
quickly and identify the root cause.
Metrics of success
Gardner: Are there any metrics of success that you can point to in terms of moving into these
products and applying the automation, ways that you can measure the impact of these particular
solutions?
Karczewski: We've begun looking at that. For example, we're looking at the number of testing
hours that it takes a manual tester to spin through a regression suite and we compare that with
literally no time at all to schedule a regression test suite run. We're computing the number of
hours that we're saving in the testing arena. We're computing the number of lines of software that
a developer creates today in hopes that we'll be able to show the productivity gains that we're
realizing from automation.
Gardner: So, it does sound like you're interested in more visibility and grasping the metrics of
how applications are performing throughout their life cycle.
HP recently announced the IT Performance Suite and an Executive Scorecard to try to help folks
move towards that higher level of visibility. Any thoughts about whether that's something that
would fit into your needs and/or have you had a chance to look that over at all?
Karczewski: We're very interested in looking at that. We're also very interested in tying the
scorecard of the builds that we're doing in the construction and the development arena. We're
very interested in tying those KPIs, those metrics, and those indicators together with the
Executive Scorecard. There's a lot of interest there.
Gardner: I always like to try to give examples. It’s one thing to tell, but it’s even nicer to show.
Do you have any examples of an actual development activity recently that you can point to and
walk us through how you've done it, what the methodology is, using some of these products and
services and developing the efficiencies and the reliability that you require?
Karczewski: Well, we did one thing, which is very new to us, but we hope to mainstream this in
the future,. For the very first time, we employed an external organization from the cloud. We
utilized LoadRunner and did a performance test directly against our production systems.
Why did we do that? Well, it’s a very huge challenge for us to build, support, and maintain many
testing environments. In order to get a very accurate read on performance and load and how our

5. production systems performed, we picked a peak off-time period, we got together with an
external cloud testing firm and they utilized LoadRunner to do performance tests. We watched
the capacity of our databases, the capacity of our servers, the capacity of our network, and the
capacity of our storage systems, as they throttled the volume forward.
We plan to do more of that as a final checkout, when we deliver new services into our production
environment.
Gardner: Well, great. We've been learning about how development and lifecycle management is
important for Paychex. It’s a human resources and payroll services company based in Rochester,
N.Y. I want to thank our guest. We've been talking with Joel Karczewski. He is the Director of
IT at Paychex. Thank you.
Karczewski: Thank you.
Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to
you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here on the show floor and we're
going to be talking about more HP news and finding more case studies to delve into.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user
experience discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BreifingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover 2011 show in Las Vegas on how
payroll and HR services provider Paychex gains benefit from application development tools.
Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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