How a Scandinavian Tech Company Boosts Growth with NDC in Bulgaria

Experiencing rapid growth through acquisitions, the company had to battle two significant challenges. The in-house IT team was barely coping with the increasing demands. Any additional software developing projects would have resulted in overwhelmed developers, unable to perform their duties effectively, or a massive investment in additional IT staffing that increases operational costs and brings in the hassle of long recruitment and onboarding procedures.

On the other hand, every new acquisition meant new systems and products added to the digital landscape. Each business function had its own approach to software development, leading to duplication of solutions and higher upkeep. The company needed a partner who can help them establish a robust software development process that can be standardized and unified.

Cutting the time to seek the right full-time hire and reducing time-to-market to develop new products and features would have allowed the company to focus on its core business and strategy and prepare for future growth. The company needed not just “yes, sirs” but experts with fresh new perspectives that can provide multiple inputs into the software development strategy and take the company products to the next level of excellence.

It can take up to several months to start a custom software development application. Many applications require a variety of skills, especially when you are planning to build a high-quality, high-value product for your business. The company wanted to move forward with its vision for a next-generation CPaaS solution to bring all of its customers and partners into a single platform with omnichannel capabilities. To achieve it, they needed a team of experienced professionals who can develop the whole software architecture and build the foundation of a highly productive platform that would be functional for at least a decade.

Considering the tech talent shortage and the lack of technical competencies in certain areas, they decided to seek a reliable near-shore development partner that operates in similar time zones, has the talent pool of experts, and the experience in delivering complex solution architecture.

Being a client-centric company with a culture of continuous innovation and mature engineering processes, Scalefocus took a flexible and collaborative approach. It accelerated our client's digital journey in several key business directions.

The ability to rapidly scale up its software development operations with experienced developers, having industry domain knowledge, enabled ongoing enhancements of the existing viable products and significant cost savings. A separate, dedicated team started working on a proof of concept (PoC) for their next-gen CPaaS solution to unlock multiple communication channels and broader functionalities for their customer base.

Knowledge transfer

When managed and shared properly, knowledge can be a precious competitive advantage for a tech company. The knowledge transfer was another critical issue that was weighted off the client's shoulders. Having experience in exchanging project and product knowledge with hundreds of clients, Scalefocus helped streamline the knowledge transfer processes between developers through efficient project documentation, one-on-one meetings, mutual code reviews, and mentoring, where our seasoned professionals had to compensate knowledge that was inevitably lost. Integrated coding practices between teams enabled the client to ramp up faster when needed, instead of being stuck in the recruitment and onboarding phase, looking for candidates and losing valuable time and resources.

Bug fixing and development of new functionalities

With accumulated sizeable technical debt, part of our teams started working on the existing Communications service platform, fixing bugs and refactoring the code where needed. Bug fixing enabled better and more reliable services infrastructure, decreased business downtime, improved end-user satisfaction, and further relieved the customer support teams of the client.

When the number of bugs dropped over time, we moved forward with developing cool new features for the platform. Our experts created a reporting service for cross-platform reports, providing the client with widgets to combine data from multiple platforms into a single report or chart.

Further, we developed a templates management solution and integrated the feature with WhatsApp message templates, empowering end-customers to push highly relevant and personalized messages through our client's Communications service platform, reaching quickly and efficiently to their audiences.

One of the company's service offerings is to enable clients to go paperless with their invoicing with cost-efficient, dynamic and flexible text-message invoicing for immediate payment. Having a proven track record in numerous integrations, our experts successfully integrated 3rd party banking software with one of their existing platforms, while a separate team was developing a new SMS routing feature for another viable product.

Preparing for the future with next-gen CPaaS

Maybe the most critical project for the client, where we focused our resources and know-how, was to lay the foundations and the solution architecture for its next-gen Communications platform as a service (CPaaS).

The platform unites all of their customers into one powerful platform with complex and flexible subscriptions, which can be configured according to the customer's needs. The platform had to be designed as an out-of-the-box solution with features tailored as per the customer's requirements. The first and foremost technical challenge was to design software architecture that would be viable and functional at least ten years after the projected rollout date of the CPaaS, scheduled for 2025. This meant that our solution had to be relevant at least 15 years from now and had to consider the rapid innovations occurring in many different areas in the digital architectural landscape. We had to harness the best practices emerging and help guide the client away from common pitfalls.

The platform had to enable our client to become a future-ready company, so we started designing the software architecture and the first value-added services with the future in mind. Our experts ensured that the proposed modules can be flexible in terms of execution and can be built on a variety of tech stacks. We considered the customers' needs and the overall objectives and mission of the client in terms of infrastructure, code quality, software development standards, best practices, cybersecurity, data distribution, GDPR, etc.

We standardized the delivery and development process, network methodology, operational and support standards, availability, encryption, and how we will meet the desired SLAs. Our solution experts developed and the first value-added services, developing PoCs for account and API management. We are continuing with the development of PoCs for the rest of the services, and we'll be heavily engaged in the development of the Minimum Viable Product afterward.