Cost savings with Testing as a service model for international information technology firm

Client

A multinational information technology company that have been in partnership with BeyondSoft since 1998.

Background

The business division from the information technology firm was looking to engage a test service partner using Testing as a Service (TaaS) model to help their business:

Improve productivity and efficiency
- Enhanced data collection
- Resources management
- Increased agility

Before Transformation

The Hardware Quality Engineering test (HWQE) was executed by multiple test vendors. The HWQE also engaged an onsite contractor at their office to manage the test execution & planning from different test partners. Besides that, the company owned all the test equirement, and conducted the test planning, logistics and defects management. This caused more cost to be incurred, and more effort needed to standardise the reporting for program team as different test partners have different tools and process.

After Transformation

Beyondsoft is the single Testing Service Provider for the HWQE where we owned all the necessary items for Test Planning & Execution (Test Resource Management, Logistics, Samples & Media, and Test Planning & Tactical) as well as Results Reporting (Data & Results, Dashboarding, Defect Tracking & Management).

BYS has invested close to USD 2 million to setup a reliability test lab within 6 months, which is fully operational.

Currently, 95% of the HWQE can be conducted in-house in BYS. Remaining 5% are certification related and to be assigned to BYS test partner.

Beyond that, the computer company has also streamlined their tools and processes for TaaS model. This in turn greatly optimizes their data collection for analysis by gathering the right data across various touchpoints.

Client’s Benefit

Through the TaaS model, the company gains an estimate cost savings of approximately USD 600K. Further, by adopting this model, it also greatly improves business agility as it brings more productivity and cost-efficiency without compromising on quality. In essence, the HWQE can now focus more on quality without spending efforts and resources in defining the test planning and reporting. By translating raw data into insights across various touchpoints, it helps to provide more relevant, personalized, and agile content for customers to drive data insights.

Integrated System Test Transition from Shanghai to Singapore and Malaysia within 6 months

Client

A multinational information technology company that have been in partnership with Beyondsoft since 1998.

Challenges

The company decided to shut down the test lab in China and shift their operations to Singapore and Malaysia. However, it is easier said than done as Covid-19 has posted one of the major impacts during this transition due to non-essential industries receiving stop work order from governments. Hence, Beyondsoft had to create an innovative way to perform the knowledge transition and complete the lab setup without jeopardizing the transition schedule.

In addition, the company also required that the test lab setup must be in accordance to the same standard in Shanghai; with strict security requirements (certified test lab, isolated network etc.) and lab facilities requirement (Test Chambers, 230V electricity output andetc.) Before the transition, the company’s DIST (Designed Integrated System Test) was conducted in-house at Shanghai using BeyondSoft resources. The Test lab and facilities are owned by the computer company’s Chinese offices, however BeyondSoft supplied the CW (expand) headcount to them.

Results

DIST was conducted in-house at the company’s Shanghai office using BYS resources and fully operational within 6 months of transition. This includes the following:

Setup functional and reliability test lab based on DIST requirement. For example, electricity upgrade to run both 110v and 230v in the test lab.
Coordinate with 3rd party supplier on setup of climatic walk-in chamber in the test lab.
Obtained canon (Canon?) certification based on the security requirement in the test lab.

Moreover, Beyondsoft had fulfilled all manpower resource requirements by filling all roles with existing talent pool plus new hires in Singapore. All training were conducted successfully via Remote Test Management initiative.

Client Benefit

The client enjoyed the benefit of consolidated and streamlined process and documentations, aside from increased efficiency by leveraging support from other Beyondsoft testing team.

Beyondsoft helps Fortune 500 client optimize website & boost conversions using actionable data insights

THE CHALLENGE

Our client’s minimalistic website design was underperforming. Key metrics continually fell short of stakeholder expectations despite the ongoing introduction of fresh site content and functionality enhancements. To achieve business goals, our client needed help identifying problem areas, leveraging actionable data insights to drive design decisions, and optimizing the website.

THE SOLUTION

Accelerating business through actionable data insights is a fundamental priority for the Beyondsoft Analytics Team. By analyzing key performance indicators and user journey pathing, the team developed custom reports that identified performance bottlenecks within user engagement metrics.

Additionally, the team evaluated marketing tools to further progress the technology stack for the business. Using data insights, the business team pinpointed problem areas and surfaced a plan to strategically prioritize and approach a re-design project.

THE RESULTS

Based on Beyondsoft’s insights-based recommendations, the business resolved upper, middle, and lower marketing funnel impediments intrinsic to its site design. Pages viewed per visit increased by 55%. This work improved marketing campaign efficiency, attracting website visitors and allowing shoppers to progress further down the marketing funnel to conversion. Furthermore, Beyondsoft unlocked downstream user actions to increase the completion of product configurations by 30%.

Cloud for Startups taps Beyondsoft to operationalize service desk

THE CHALLENGE

The customer needed a knowledgeable service desk vendor to quickly operationalize their Cloud for Startups program and onboard venture capital partner startups. The vendor also needed to offer a premium white-glove experience for the program’s members.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft quickly ramped up an experienced team that had delivered outstanding results in a similar program. As the program rolled out, the Beyondsoft concierge support team began to fully manage the program’s application and onboarding processes, as well as the program’s inboxes to respond to all program, product, and service inquiries and resolve all partnership, eligibility, and billing issues.

The Beyondsoft concierge support team also provided a frictionless, white-glove experience for the members to help them navigate the program with ease and efficiency and accelerate their progress toward joint-sell ready status. Recently, Beyondsoft completed the automation of most the application and onboarding processes, allowing resources to be redirected to Tier 3 and Tier 4 escalation support, which adds greater value to the customer’s success and required more expert program knowledge.

THE RESULTS

Since the cloud program’s inception three years ago, Beyondsoft has successfully supported the program’s day-to-day operations, which has seen exponential growth. In 2020 alone, the customer reported the program had enabled B2B startups to close $1 billion in revenue through deployment of cloud solutions and new business opportunities.

The customer sees Beyondsoft as a partner in the continued improvement of the Cloud for Startups program. Progress is underway to engage Beyondsoft’s in-house artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) team to introduce ML and predictive analytics solutions to help the customer conduct business with proactive decisions, intelligent KPI monitoring, and complex workflow automation.

Networking hardware giant accelerates Power BI Performance by 18X

THE CHALLENGE

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our client needed to conduct a complex Power BI analysis of office building usage by its worldwide workforce to determine which buildings/locations should be closed and the financial impact of those closures. The analysis needed to include data on the operational costs and building usage, as well as the criticality of various job types and real-time worldwide COVID-19 trends and hot spots.

Unfortunately, the reports developed in-house were very inefficient and took a long time to render, causing serious stability problems. They needed a better solution.

THE SOLUTION

The client connected with Beyondsoft through the Microsoft Power BI partner program. Beyondsoft’s Power BI experts determined that the complexity of the calculations, sheer volume of data, and the inefficient data model all contributed to performance bottlenecks. The prolonged time needed to render all the visuals made the in-house developed reports unstable.

To resolve these issues, Beyondsoft leveraged Microsoft Power BI, Oracle Server, Smartsheet, Excel, and R Scripting to optimize coding and data and eliminate the bottlenecks. The most impactful optimizations included:

Reducing data load size by millions of rows to improve data refresh and data transformation times.

Tuning Oracle SQL code to improve and filter unneeded data elements.

Updating the data model to create a reduced memory-footprint of the analytics engine.

Creating and updating data relationships to allow enhancement of additional metrics and KPIs.

Rewriting calculation code to decrease complexity.

Completing a query plan optimization analysis to find and resolve query inefficiencies.

THE RESULTS

The series of Power BI optimizations significantly reduced the rendering time, down from six minutes to just 20 seconds for each report. The client was delighted with the 18X increase in efficiency. The vast improvement allowed the client to reliably make proactive decisions to address business continuity, risk mitigation, and cost reduction in response to the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Software giant elevates quality and capacity with Beyondsoft QA and testing services

THE CHALLENGE

Our client’s Digital Video & Audio, Digital Imaging, and Pro Digital Imaging product teams are responsible for the most popular Adobe software on the market, including the Premiere Pro, After Effect, Rush, Aero, Photoshop, and Lightroom, among others. Serving millions of users worldwide, the ability to reliably scale the testing of new features to guarantee stability is a top priority. Their testing and quality assurance (QA) efforts were complicated by the new release cycle changing from semiannually to monthly. New products like the Premiere Rush Mobile even began to release weekly. In addition, the Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines demanded nightly verifications.

Better and faster testing was needed to ensure quality and performance without regression issues. The client’s team of quality engineers needed help covering the staggering amount of QA and testing work efficiently and cost-effectively.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft was the first-ever vendor brought in by the client to support its software development. As a leading vendor of QA and testing services with delivery centers around the world, Beyondsoft quickly assembled a mixed-shore team to help our client manage its software testing and delivery processes. The QA team reported and tracked issues and maintained test cases and test plans to make sure all basic functions in the new builds were good and free of any blocking/regression issues and other critical bugs. It also provided timely responses and proactive feedback to the client to improve the products.

Because of the time difference, the offshore team integrated perfectly with the San Jose-based development team to conduct test pass against all products on a nightly basis. The Beyondsoft team played a critical role in the monthly release cycle. Since our team started supporting the client, the application crash rate has dropped significantly to an unprecedented 2%.

The client’s newly acquired QA expertise and capacity allowed it to optimize the development of its products and processes and mitigate risks, where tests and verifications are implemented more frequently and earlier in the software development life cycle. Beyondsoft also brought cross-platform device testing capability for all hardware devices including PC, laptop, tablets, and mobile phones running all varieties of operating systems.

The significant improvements in the quality and reliability of the software were evident to the users. As the result, user satisfaction saw a steady rise. One long-time Adobe user wrote, “This version of the Premiere Pro is the most stable one I’ve ever used.” Today, Beyondsoft is the client’s integral partner in enabling the fast release engineering capability through manual and automated API and component and functional testing of high priority and high visibility products.

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AWS data migration boosts scalability and flexibility for global ad company

THE CHALLENGE

IAS had decided to gradually migrate their full infrastructure to AWS, including a solution which helps customers track and optimize ad campaigns across publishers and partners such as Facebook. Core to this technology is the ability to collect, process, aggregate, and analyze ad impressions, clicks, views, and other events related to individual ad sessions.

Over the years, their on-premise solution for ingesting ad events had become unwieldy to support and difficult to scale. The solution was not set up to work in the cloud. It needed to be refactored to simplify code management, take advantage of AWS native services, and perform optimally in the cloud. They needed coding and migration support from an AWS data migration veteran like Beyondsoft.

THE SOLUTION

In less than six months, Beyondsoft updated and migrated the IAS solution to AWS. Prior to the migration, Beyondsoft refactored the solution’s entire codebase from top to bottom and implemented a cloud-based ad event ingestion solution to support multiple partners, minimize operational costs and coding, and scale dynamically to accommodate sudden volume spikes.

To streamline the code and enable scalability, Beyondsoft analyzed the logic for each partner, identifying shared code and pinpointing standard areas for partner-specific logic. This effort laid the foundation for a simpler, more transparent codebase that could be quickly scaled to new partners while being easier and more cost-effective to support in the long term. In addition, the refactoring also optimized the solution for the cloud and leveraging AWS capabilities.

HOW IT WORKS

The comprehensive solution makes the most of AWS functionality while reacting dynamically with speed. To achieve optimal performance, it separates the ad events pipeline into two pieces: a receiver at the front end and a deliverer at the back end.

For the front-end receiver service, a lightweight Node.js web-service behind Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) provides the HTTP API endpoints to which partners submit ad events. The application has a very short start-up time and scales automatically based on the incoming traffic volume. The application validates and converts partner-specific API calls to standard ad event records. It then passes these records to a background Kinesis Producer Library (KPL) process that buffers and pushes the records to a Kinesis Data Stream which smooths the shape of the incoming traffic, enabling downstream processes to work more efficiently. Amazon ELB and auto-scaling Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)/AWS Fargate for the pipeline front-end enable low operational costs, while still being a serverless, easy-to-maintain solution.

On the back end of the Kinesis Data Stream—the deliverer service—a Kinesis Client Library (KCL)-based application enriches ad event records with additional properties derived from external services, and stores the records in the Amazon S3/AWS Glue Catalog-based data lake for further processing. Amazon Cloud Watch collects and surfaces pipeline metrics for dashboard monitoring, and alerts administrators when pipeline errors exceed specific thresholds.

RESULTS

Reduced operational costs: The streamlined solution in AWS requires fewer resources.
Increased scalability: IAS can quickly and cost effectively scale to new partners.
Improved flexibility & performance: IAS leverages the performance and advanced capabilities of AWS.
Improved integration: The new solution integrates with AWS-based client infrastructure for greater collaboration.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Fargate, Amazon Kinesis, Kinesis Data Streams (KDS), Kinesis Producer Library (KPL), Kinesis Client Library (KCL), Amazon S3, AWS Glue, AWS Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), AWS CloudFormation

OUR EXPERIENCE

Beyondsoft has performed hundreds of data migrations for large enterprise customers. Our certified practitioners have hands-on, best-practice knowledge of all the major platforms. As an AWS Data Migration Competency Partner, Beyondsoft has invested in building deep proficiency on the AWS platform.

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Leading digital advertising agency advances data analytics using Vertica on AWS cloud

THE CHALLENGE

The client wanted to use their business intelligence tool to query their historical data for 90 days in under two seconds with more than 80 concurrent users. Their current system included data in Hadoop clusters and Infobright DB on-premise cluster, which was unable to handle their data analytics requirements.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft’s Big Data consulting team proposed a solution using Vertica, a columnar database on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS cloud solution would provide the added scalability, elasticity, and performance that the customer wanted. The project consisted of creating Vertica clusters in a repeatable manner and a pipeline-based approach for Vertica DDL. It also included moving large amounts of data daily to the Vertica cluster.

The project consisted of three phases:

Phase 1 involved creating a repeatable deployment process through infrastructure as code (Terraform) for Vertica cluster. The Vertica AMI was procured from AWS Marketplace. Beyondsoft engineers added the ability to launch different Vertica nodes as part of a cluster through tags to AWS Elastic Load Balancer (ELB). The Vertica cluster consist of two AZ’s in active/active nodes, with 16 nodes total and 90 days of data, which came to approximately 40TB. AWS Systems Manager Service (SSM) and CloudWatch Logs are used for administration of the cluster. This Vertica infrastructure as code also integrates with the customer’s self-servicing tool for their developers.
Phase 2 included a pipeline-based approach for Vertica DDL. Vertica DDL is pushed through the pipeline using Liquibase, a java framework for database change and deployment. This ensures that production Vertica clusters are not touched manually for schema changes.
Phase 3 involved setting up ETL from the Hadoop cluster to Vertica using a producer/consumer pattern. The ETL code is written in python code with on-demand Fargate containers, which extract data from Hadoop and store it in zipped files in S3. From there, jobs are created to load data into Vertica from S3. The data is around 120GB/day with around 570M rows loaded at its peak. The customer-facing java application has several dashboards which are able to procure data from Vertica in under two seconds query time with concurrent usage.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Vertica on AWS, AWS SSM, AWS CloudWatch logs, AWS S3, AWS ELB, AWS Fargate, AWS Parameter Store, AWS ECR, Python, Jenkins, etc.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

Beyondsoft educated the client’s data analytics team around the newly created solution and Terraform and provided a runbook, to enable them to both manage and add to the solution in future. Beyondsoft also provided education on the various AWS services and customized training sessions on various topics.

BENEFITS

Moving from an on-premise cluster to the cloud increased the scalability, agility, and performance of the whole solution. Taking a DevOps approach through data pipelines decreased go-to-market time for code changes. Infrastructure as code provided a repeatable way to create infrastructure, increasing operational consistency and reducing bugs.

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Beyondsoft Service Desk increases operational efficiency and scalability

THE CHALLENGE

The client needed a new content delivery platform to support a global base of OEM partners. The client was looking for deep CMS expertise and successful experience in running efficient service desks to manage content creation and change requests.

THE SOLUTION

The client leveraged Beyondsoft’s SiteCore expertise to establish a new content delivery platform. In addition to implementing the new CMS, the Beyondsoft service desk implemented a new publishing model to improve the efficiency of the content creation, modification, and audit processes.

The client gained the experience and ability to scale quickly; recruiting, training, and transitioning work from
the incumbent supplier in less than 30 days. When the transition was complete, the editorial and publishing team was already standing by to create content to support the 80+ stakeholders. In FY17, the new team created and wrote for 900 assets and edited and published 1900 assets.

The CMS expertise also helped the client to reliably migrate 2115 existing site assets. All content was checked for tone consistency and adherence to the Microsoft style guide. Collectively, the service desk resolved/published over 3900 tickets and publishing requests in FY17. Throughout the normal run workload, the client never saw a service interruption or missed SLA.

Other improvements included enhanced program governance that included a rhythm of business engagement for the MBR/QBR reports. The client also leveraged Beyondsoft’s BI/analytics experience to continually improve its KPI/site performance. Most impressively, tickets were automatically resolved with greater accuracy, which increased the overall service desk efficiency by 6%.

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International WordPress hosting company implements ConvergDB to better utilize AWS cloud resources

THE CHALLENGE

The client needed to improve customer visibility into usage, billing, and service performance on AWS cloud. They faced lengthy and time-consuming data queries. When processing customer logs, it took more than eight hours to produce one report using an unoptimized process. Limited resources caused frequent system crashes, and processing a large number of small files created system overhead that skyrocketed job execution times.

BEYONDSOFT HELPS LEVERAGE FULL AWS ANALYTICS PORTFOLIO

Beyondsoft’s data experts worked with the client to implement ConvergDB, a Beyondsoft open source software, to create a data structure that would better utilize cloud resources. This created an optimal file format to reduce query times without increasing bandwidth. The tool helped to create scripts that were used to build and manage the necessary resources in AWS cloud.

THE BENEFITS

Increased query performance with analytics shared between business groups
Full use of the AWS Analytics portfolio
Enabled cost control and utilization of compute and storage resources
Efficient access to data logs on application servers for increased transparency to customer

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