Streamlining SaaS Operations – Built on the InterSystems Data Platform

The Client

Our client, a world leader in SaaS solutions built on the InterSystems Data platform Ensemble and designed to simplify the complexity of marketing activation, was facing a backlog of client change requests, as well as system and software upgrades, from its base of 100,000 users in 127 countries. These users rely on our client’s platform to manage, measure, and optimize their brand marketing, point of sale, promotions, and premium activation activities.

The client engaged First Line Software for staff augmentation but then realized that we could help with the user experience side, better documentation of processes, and create a roadmap for migrating their business to the Cloud.

The client owns and operates one of the largest marketing activation platforms that helps marketing professionals manage, measure, and optimize all aspects of their marketing activation lifecycle. Users log into the platform more than one million times annually to access tools that help them with the delivery of campaigns that are time and budget-sensitive.

The platform results from 20 years and over $25 million US of investment in continuous product innovation and currently accounts for over $3 billion in annual managed marketing spend.

The Challenge

Based in London and with 100,000 users around the world, the client was experiencing a significant backlog of change requests from users, along with requests for system architecture optimization and hardware/OS upgrades. Our team’s analysis of current processes and conditions revealed several critical issues and blockers, including:

Gaps in Skills and resources needed to achieve the desired outcomes
Lack of up-to-date development documentation, resulting in confusion and inefficiencies.

Development bottlenecks: The internal development team’s velocity and size were insufficient, causing delays, bottlenecks in project progression, and a growing backlog – along with user discontent.

Insufficient and outdated end-client documentation meant users were unable to utilize the system efficiently.

Code management issues: Problems with version control management and DevOps were causing integration challenges and delays.

Performance issues: The system suffered from slow page loading times, especially during large data processing tasks.

An outdated User Interface was negatively impacting user experience and engagement.

Outdated OS and hardware: The client needed to establish a UAT environment in the cloud, followed by migration from the private cloud to the public cloud provider, to optimize costs and enhance security.

Our Approach

First Line Software’s approach included several stages to address specific issues. As a global InterSystems partner we bring knowledge and experience that we try to share with our clients. The client wanted to enhance the team’s capacity and velocity. We started by identifying the skills or resources gaps and bringing in the right people from our global pool of 500 strong engineers – We identified the need for a Business Analyst, two senior software engineers and a part-time QA to structure the continuous process of task analysis and development.

Our team in partnership with the client, focused for six months on solving bottlenecks and improving the processes in handling the backlog of client change requests by:

Starting a regular documentation process for the current system features and settings to collect and maintain an up-to-date knowledge base after decreasing the number of requests in the backlog.

Involving a senior UI/UX Designer & Front End developer to prepare UX improvements, mockups, and elements/styles library, as well as a custom UI for the new clients.

Migrating the client’s test environment to the cloud and preparing the instructions for the migration process for future use.

Creating test environments in the cloud, to establish instructions for the complete platform setup.

Setting up monitoring for all of the platform’s services.

Enhancing security by forbidding outdated TLS protocols, and non-secure cipher suites.

Outcomes

Aligning with the client on outcomes is one of the most important parts of a project and then it is up to us to deliver on those outcomes. Here some outcomes that we are proud of:

The client’s change request waiting time decreased from 3-6 months to 1-2 months.

All the features that were implemented during the engagement have full documentation with details, requirements, and acceptance criteria.

The documentation of settings purpose was created to help the growing team to understand the current condition of each client instance and for future instance migration to the new hardware.