Li9 Technology Solutions
Paving the Road for Successful DevOps Implementations

Founded almost 20 years ago, Li9 is a company that focuses on open source and cloud solutions to provide digital transformation and infrastructures to their customers. The company works with their clients to create an environment where traditional IT frameworks are re-architected so that they maximize business value and deliver measurable ROI. Li9 continuously assists their customers to develop and improve IT strategies by using the power of the cloud, automation, orchestration, DevOps methodologies, security, and customized workflows. In an interview with CIO Applications, Armando Arias, the president of Li9, shares insights about his organization while highlighting the features, functionalities, and unique value proposition of their service offering.

Li9 in a Nutshell

Over the years, our greatest success has come from working closely with customers to understand their business goals and ensuring that our activities provide expected return on investments. We use a wide range of experience, knowledge, expertise, and product offerings that allow us to skillfully access, analyze, and determine the best IT strategy to match an organization’s short and long-term business goals. Li9 has over 16 years of success in the IT industry and has picked key technology partners that focus on open source, cloud, and software-defined solutions, such as Red Hat, IBM, Sysdig, NGINX, HPE, AWS, and Google. We bring these solutions to customers in partnership with companies that combine business and technology, such as Synnex Corp., to ensure that our solutions meet customers’ business, technology, and financial goals.

Technology Trends Fostering DevOps Culture

Open-source architectures and containers/microservices will have a significant impact on customer DevOps solutions in 2019. Li9 understands the value of the latter; traditional function-specific proprietary infrastructure components are replaced by software-defined open-source solutions that are controllable through code and easier to include in the DevOps streams. Almost all new DevOps-related technologies will be developed with open-source technology.

Li9 helps customers initiate the open source path by adopting open enterprise platforms for development and infrastructure. With the right platforms in place, we work with customers to implement a more open and collaborative culture. When our customers have mastered collaboration internally, we introduce them to several open-source communities.

Also, many new applications are using the microservice containers infrastructure. In fact, the container environment was created with DevOps requirements in mind. The technology gives developers the ability to create environments that are isolated from other applications, allowing them to focus effectively on application development.

Containers can also include software dependencies, such as specific versions of programming language runtimes and other software libraries. Li9 helps customers identify the value in microservices for their organization, thereby increasing their productivity, decreasing their downtime, and showing the difference in the bottom line.

Challenges in Adopting DevOps

The IT environment is experiencing a significant change that includes business units making major technology decisions. The greatest challenge is the mindset of the people in their IT organizations. It is very difficult to move teams from the concept of legacy hardware to software-defined solutions, from hands-on to fully automated.

The process of DevOps implementation is critical to the success of its adoption. It is overwhelming to consider transitioning an entire environment from traditional IT to a DevOps model. It is a significant challenge that any CIO would face. This is why, at Li9, we work with our customers to design and execute a transitional plan that is strategic, gradual, and incremental.

Li9 recently completed a project with a U.S. telecommunications company to establish a content delivery network that is currently serving over 1.3 million subscribers. In another winning instance, Li9’s architects designed and implemented a greenfield environment that leveraged Red Hat’s OpenStack, OpenShift, and Ansible solutions to provide an automated software-defined data center. This provided the basis for highly integrated Development and Operations teams.

The Li9 Differentiator

At Li9, we leverage our experience and knowledge of traditional enterprise IT and evaluate leading open-source and container solutions to ensure that the recommended strategies support digital transformation, all while meeting our customers’ requirements for security, availability, and maintainability. We take this philosophy and apply it to achieve the key benefits of DevOps: collaboration, rapid delivery, reliability, security, and scalability. To cover all these aspects, Li9 works closely with customers and provides tools that allow them to innovate and implement change faster, so that they adapt to changing markets better, and become more efficient while driving positive business results.

As a company with some of the most highly certified specialists in the world and more than 10 years of experience, our Architects and Engineers know better than most, how to design and implement a variety of solutions in order to address a host of business IT challenges. Our solutions combine practices like continuous integration and delivery to test whether each automated change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices help our customers stay informed of performance in realtime.

Li9’s architects work with a “train the trainer” mentality to help customers build more effective teams under a DevOps culture, which emphasizes values such as ownership and accountability. Developers and operations teams collaborate closely, share many responsibilities, and combine their workflows in an agile performance environment, allowing for continuous development, modification, and change.

We guide our customers to maintain compliance and control while adopting a DevOps model without sacrificing security, by using automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques.

Strategic Roadmap

Li9 will continue to invest in our people and ensure that we are aware of new technologies and the impact that they will have on our customers. Li9 has always been and will continue to be a go-to solutions provider for customers. The company is continually evaluating new open-source technologies and will be adding a number of solutions to the portfolio in 2019.