Challenges

The biggest challenge was using on-premises infrastructure, which brought with it the constant need to support the hardware in the face of increasing data volumes. The bank required new approaches to working with data that the current infrastructure could not support. In light of this, it turned to IBA Group in search of a solution to the several competing challenges it faced.

Background

А huge global company with a strong technology focus turned to IBA Group with the task of transferring their client’s infrastructure to cloud services. At the time of the beginning of cooperation, the end customer of our client used a lot of data storage for the following internal service tasks:

• production cost tracking;
• dialer’s information;
• providing information to dealers,
• information about clients, employees.

The main part of the infrastructure was based on the Oracle database and the Informatica Power Center ETL tool, as well as many other tools such as Cron, Shell Script, Java, JS.

Several years ago, the company’s management decided to migrate the entire infrastructure to the cloud. During modernization, the company brought production processes to a single standard, increasing its structure, including a unified approach to development, implementing an approved technology stack, and ensuring quality control of development.

Business Challenges

During the modernization process, the end client encountered the following difficulties:

1. The existing services of the company were slow, which impacted all processes — from data analysis to hiring employees.
2. Frequent failures due to errors within the services led to a partial loss of data and the inability to make management decisions, prepare accounting reports, prepare data on the movement of warehouse resources, and more.
3. Permanent delays in providing new services due to the slowdown in development or the impossibility of their implementation, led to a decrease in the company’s attractiveness among customers.
4. Scaling within the framework of the old infrastructure could not be carried out without extra payments, due to the low flexibility of vendor licensing offers.
5. Recruitment of the necessary employees such as full-stack developers presented difficulties due to the huge variety of technologies used; cheaper resources were not of the right quality or up to the high standards of the company.

Key Objective #1

Migrate company services to new infrastructure in the cloud.

Key Objective #2

Tailor AWS vendor migration offerings to company services.

Solution Highlights

The customer formed a separate team that was responsible for the innovation and unification of disparate systems into a single infrastructure. IBA Group provided engineers and architects to form custom teams to participate in the adaptation of infrastructure modernization solutions, developing the top-level structure of the entire ecosystem, as well as general approaches and rules for each system separately.

After giving recommendations for the development and auditing of the process, the IBA Group team directly implemented this migration. To improve the quality of decisions made at the architecture design stage, an AWS vendor was involved.

Due to the business’s specific features, each area had its own architecture, for which separate teams were created that were responsible for its adaption and improvement. They were also involved in the transfer of existing services for their area to cloud technologies — AWS Glue, PySpark, ECS, Kubernetes, EMR + PySpark.

One of the important conditions was a “seamless” transition — teams during the migration process ensured that access to existing services remained uninterrupted.

Project Results

Benefits the client received by moving data management to a cloud service:

1. Increased fault tolerance by fixing bugs and using ready-made cloud-platform services for interaction between different customer services.
2. Continuity of current services during the migration process was maintained.
3. Cost reduction in the form of refusal of some server capacities due to the transition to the cloud service.
4. Flexible planning of financial expenses for scaling due to the pay-as-you-go system provided by the cloud solution.
5. Reduced time for recruiting specialists in the IT department by unifying the requirements for them, defining clear rules, and specifying the technology stack.
6. Reduction of the number of narrowly focused specialists without full-time employment due to their retraining in the technology stack adopted by the company.

Business Challenge

Build a secure and scalable data aggregation and analytics cognitive platform that transforms key business processes.

Solution

IBA Group developers worked on the Cognitive Enterprise Data Platform (CEDP). This platform makes it easy to get, share, and integrate enterprise data. Various business units of the company interact with the platform as producers and consumers of data.

Result

CEDP currently contains over 100 enterprise data assets. Datasets include customer master data, product offering master data, unified taxonomy, and more.

CEDP has big data analytics capabilities such as BigSQL, HDFS, DashDB for performance-based analytics, unstructured data annotation capabilities, machine learning, deep learning, and access to IBM Cloud Services.

Project Overview

Create an application to support the customer’s sellers and business partners selling support and maintenance services.

Solution

Certified Salesforce developers from IBA Group commenced work under the project in September 2019. They joined a distributed team of 100 people, which includes experts in Salesforce, Java, etc.

The application is built on microservice architecture (REST). To manage support contracts, a new solution for Quote-to-Cash processes has been created. The system will be integrated with CRM and ERP platforms.

If the system identifies that the support contract will expire in the near future, then it automatically creates new sales opportunity. A separate customer structure – Territory Alignment – is responsible for the distribution of opportunity between sales specialists. When a sales specialist receives a notification, he/she can proceed to upsale in a timely manner – extend the contract or transfer it to another manager.

Project Results

Now the project is at the MVP stage. The customer can already try the main functionality of the solution, which will be improved in future releases.

Business challenge

Deploy a new CRM for developing an IT company’s business in the area of sales of SaaS products. For this purpose, it is necessary to adapt CRM to the customer’s business processes, and perform several integrations: transfer data from several different systems into one.

SOLUTIONS HIGHLIGHTS

Certified developers and administrators from IBA Group joined the distributed Salesforce team in January 2018. The team consists of 200 people from several countries, including developers, configurators, business analysts, and test automation specialists. 13 of them are IBA Group employees.

The application consists of two parts: CRM – Salesforce Sales Cloud and Quote-to-Cash. At one of the stages of the CRM system, a valid lead is registered and transformed into an opportunity. At the final stage, the Quote-to-Cash process starts: configuration -> quote -> proposal -> contract -> invoice—> ordering -> billing -> provisioning.

The opportunity has various attributes: product, point of sale, customer language, etc. Based on these attributes, the system generates a list of recommended content for sales specialists: selects presentations, white papers and other materials. The application may be integrated with the customer repository to avoid copying of all documents into Salesforce.

In their work, administrators and developers from IBA Group used middleware – the Tray.io platform. Its advantage is that it facilitates integration of Salesforce with many databases and services due to the large number of connectors and ETL (Javascript). The application has been working since April 2018 and is now gradually switching to the support phase.

Result

A convenient solution for sellers and business partners of the customer who sell SaaS products. Integration with the customer’s marketing platform: its leads are transferred to an external system. Over 2 years, revenue from orders that were switched to quotations in this system increased 10 times.