Situation
Our client, a leading telecommunication company, had successfully implemented an internal employee satisfaction survey tool. Through an innovative approach, managers and employees could get real-time feedbacks about the morale of their teams and trends inside the company.
Motivated by its internal success, our Client saw the opportunity to offer this tool as a product so that other companies could profit from it as well.
OWT was approached to manage the complex transition of this internal tool to a full Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.
Approach
1. Outsourcing the tool into Open Web Technology
The project began by outsourcing client's application to our internal infrastructure. This included an extensive knowledge transfer to understand the technical choices made and anticipate the technology changes to be come.
2. Defining the architecture and selecting the best technical solution
We analyzed the viable solutions to deploy the software-as-a-service and support multitenancy. The analysis included the technology assessment, the implementation approach and estimated costs.
The term "software multitenancy" refers to a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants. A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance.
Among the viable solutions, the most notable ones were: one database per tenant, one schema per tenant or a shared database. Our client's requirements regarding data isolation and scalability made him opt to have one database per tenant.
3. White-labelling into a software-as-a-service application
We completely restructured the application to ensure data isolation and provide enough scalability for upcoming growth. We relied on Swisscom Application Cloud to dynamically create a new database on-the-fly at client creation and on Amazon Web Services to dynamically create the necessary SSL certificates and the client URL.
4. Capturing market needs
Besides the technical implementation, our team assisted our client from a product perspective. By benchmarking the current application with other market solutions, we prioritized key functionalities to implement and evolve. Within a few weeks the application was extended with an e-mail module, a section to manage user profiles and a section to moderate comments.
After only a few months, our Client was able to launch pilot projects with key companies in just one click. The new service can handle without hassles companies ranging from 2 to 20'000 employees while preserving perfect security and flexibility.
