The Challenge
This global company offers a variety of software products to the banking industry. For years, it has been providing solutions to its customers in a traditional manner, requiring a significant amount of manual work and consulting for deployment.
To broaden the reach to its customer base and become more competitive, the company aimed to offer its services via a true SaaS model, thereby allowing customers to deploy, configure, monitor and manage solutions in the cloud via a web portal.
The Solution
As part of its SaaS foundation program, the company engaged Cloudreach to develop an SaaS engine for banking software solutions on Microsoft Azure.
Cloudreach undertook an extensive discovery phase to gain an understanding of required features and determine how the solutions were to be developed and deployed. Working in an agile manner, in two-week sprints, Cloudreach delivered a minimum viable product (MVP) and subsequently completed a production-ready version.
Cloudreach designed and built a highly available, secure solution comprising both infrastructure and software:
Infrastructure
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) platform, a modular and extendable software architecture on which to host microservices.
- Enabled refactoring, rehosting and replatforming of Linux and Windows servers into Azure
- Key technologies include CosmosDB using MongoDB API as a datastore, JFrog Artifactory and Eventhub.
- API integrations and interfaces
Software
A collection of microservices that deploy the financial software with customer-specific configuration.
- A Solution Catalogue
- Blueprint Service
- State Machine
- Other supporting services
The software also has the ability to create Microsoft Azure subscriptions for each customer dynamically to ensure tenant isolation.
Full SDLC with automated testing and HiveMQ MQTT message broker is also part of the solution.
The Partnership
Designing and developing the cloud infrastructure and implementing a SaaS engine at the same time is complex and requires a rare combination of infrastructure and application modernization expertise.
Cloudreach’s team of experts and collaborative approach has provided tremendous value to the software firm. By following all agile principles, Cloudreach was able to adapt quickly to changes in scope and requirements – such as supporting the company’s front end team – while continuing to drive the momentum of the project.
The Outcome
Cloudreach deployed the MVP of the SaaS engine in just four months and onboarded multiple software solutions to the production SaaS platform. The company has realized numerous benefits with this solution:
- Significantly sped up solution implementation for customers by offering easy, automated deployment.
- Reduced time to market for new solutions
- Improved competitive edge by broadening market reach and ease of deployment.
- Equipped the pre-sales team with a valuable tool to easily demonstrate proof of concept to customers.
- Reduced time spent on upgrades, maintenance and management.
Now that the financial software company has a sound basis for automating its solution deployment and maintenance, it is able to deliver more value to new and existing customers.
About the Customer
This global software enterprise offers digital banking solutions to financial institutions around the world, helping them, in turn, provide innovative and flexible solutions to businesses and consumers. The company employs more than 7.000 people in numerous countries.
