Agile Platform Upgrade

Agile is a key business system for both you and Acuity, enabling us to collaborate in a digital, real-time approach that gives us a significant advantage over our competitors.  We have been making a multi-million-dollar investment over the last year to upgrade the infrastructure platform that enables the agile applications you use every day.  This is a focused effort to optimize our hybrid datacenters and cloud footprints. We are closing out the Conyers datacenter and moving the remaining resources to our more modern Dallas datacenter, with a Chicago datacenter used for disaster recovery.  At the same time, we continue to move applications and services to our cloud instance in Microsoft Azure, providing all the benefits of cloud computing including reliability, performance and scalability.

Migrating to these modern environments provides many benefits:

• Resiliency and faster response times through improved Compute and storage hardware
• Faster network speeds and connections to the Internet, including “express routes” to Azure
• Provides the foundation for re-writing agile in a modular fashion with each new app being hosted in the cloud, OS & browser agnostic, and accessing data through fast and scalable microservices
• Redundant electric power at every level including emergency backup
• 24×7 operations with near zero planned downtime and “hot” failover to redundant systems in Azure or Chicago    

We strive to make our upgrades and moves transparent to you and our other agile customers.  Today we are in a transitional stage where some of our application servers and databases are in Conyers, some are in Azure, and some are in Dallas. These various services need to “talk” to each other, which can mean round trip communications – over the internet – to each of the datacenters. As we migrate and consolidate datacenters, performance can be temporarily impacted. Conyers is a long way from Dallas, and it takes extra time to transmit the data. Most functions are not affected, but enough are where it is noticeable and an irritation to your teams, especially when working with very large quotes or orders, or long lists of data.

We are actively completing these datacenter moves and should return to normal, or even improved response times, as we complete our final two stages of the migration.  The timeline for these transitions is mid-December for agile specific resources and mid-January for our orders database move.  Meanwhile, thank you for your patience as we make these necessary moves. 

INTERNET BROWSER UPDATE

Many of you have seen various news articles and/or notifications from companies around the future support of Internet Explorer version 11 (IE 11).  These messages have caused a lot of confusion, but the key takeaway is IE 11 is part of the Windows 10 operating system and will continue to be available and supported by Microsoft for the foreseeable future.

There is no risk for IE 11 dependent websites – they will continue to be supported by Microsoft in IE 11.

What is changing, however, is many website-based services will stop supporting IE 11.  For example, website services like Office 365, Dropbox, and others have announced they will stop supporting IE 11.  Why?  Because IE 11 is not based on the same modern browser standards, service companies must dedicate significant efforts to support a very low market share browser (IE 11). So, while agile will continue to work in IE 11, you will need to launch a Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge browser for these modern websites.

In response to this deprecated support of IE 11 by modern websites, Microsoft has provided a way to run IE 11 dependent websites inside their latest Edge browser – called Edge Chromium. If you have a current Windows 10 operating system, you should already have the new Edge browser. Edge now runs the same rendering engine as Google Chrome, but also adds some additional features including support for IE 11 websites.

Unfortunately, Microsoft did not make it easy to configure Edge to support IE 11 websites. Acuity has successfully implemented the appropriate configurations internally and will pilot  with a few agents to evaluate how this might be accomplished in the agency networks before rolling it out to all of you.

Of course, we will continue to make investments in upgrading agile applications to natively support modern browsers, specifically Chrome and Edge. This effort will take some time and will be done independently for each agile application.  Several agile applications already support modern browsers and we will continue to make this transition a priority until all legacy agile applications are updated.

One of our initiatives this year is to provide better visibility to our agile roadmap, including updates to browser support, application changes, and cloud or infrastructure updates.  We also want to be open and transparent around our application performance and reliability.  These areas directly impact your organization’s productivity, and we want to provide clear reporting on our services.

We value your partnership and always welcome your feedback.  Please feel free to contact me directly with any concerns or suggestions on how we can better serve you!

Pat Quinn

CIO/SVP

Acuity Brands Lighting