Agilence, a leader in cloud-based reporting solutions for Retail Loss Prevention and Operations partners with xforty to greatly improve Retail 20/20 case tracking and reporting capabilities.
Building Better Business Intelligence
Issue
It's 2008 and our customer has a global network of proprietary hardware and software servicing the financial community. As the leader in the financial data market, they wanted to be able to grow market share. They also were experiencing pressure from competitors who were able to leverage web-based Business Intelligence tools. Our customer wanted to expand their product offerings to include improved reporting, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, and benchmarking.
Our customer wanted the user interface on their proprietary hardware platform to provide wizards enabling the creation of ad hoc reports, schedules, profiles, etc. They also wanted the ability to include custom dashboards providing at-a-glance views of KPIs (key performance indicators).
Solution
A three year project was funded to develop a suite of custom Business Intelligence software tools to be sold, and built on top of the customer's exiting network of proprietary hardware and software. Because of his problem solving and technical expertise, an xforty consultant was contracted to be a lead Java developer for the project. As a lead developer he was involved in the architecture review committee, and daily scrum meetings. xforty's consultant was responsible for setting up the Java Spring development environment and establishing the Continuous Integration (CI) process. A CI process leveraging Jenkins was set up to automate builds, tests, and deployments.
Outcome
Within the first year the initial suite was deployed to select beta customers. Six months later, an initial product announcement with first customer ship dates was executed. Our consultant's contract was maintained for an additional year to establish an in-house team of developers to maintain and grow the customer's Business Intelligence offerings.
Today sales continue to exceed expectations and our customer has maintained their market share leadership. An in-house team of ten developers is maintained by our customer in order to grow and support the Business Intelligence tools they are now providing worldwide to the financial community.
Notice: Key architecture design elements and corporation names have been omitted in order to protect the proprietary investments of the customer.
