Our customer:
Ingenico Marketing Solutions
The Ingenico Marketing Solutions GmbH is a leading pan-European provider of customer loyalty concepts and offers omnichannel loyalty programs (with or without payment functions), voucher cards, ROI oriented marketing services and data analytics.
- 25 years of loyalty and voucher card know-how
- 140 conducted programs in 8 countries
- 100 million managed customer accounts
Starting Point
As a service provider Ingenico Marketing Solutions is active in eight European countries and operates more than 140 loyalty and voucher card programs. Many well-known customers work together with Ingenico Marketing Solutions, among them Douglas, Aral, toom and Pandora. Call centers offer services for the voucher card programs and answer customer questions. In early 2017, these call centers used an IT system with a front-end technology which was no longer state-of-the-art. One of the consequences: Maintenance of the systems became tedious and further development could no longer meet the demand for change.
We wanted to upgrade technology and needed support on choosing the technology meeting our requirements. As a service provider with our own software development, our main goal was to create the necessary market transparency and to select a modern and long-term supported technology with the support of cronn.
Solution
The aim of the project was to select and implement a new front-end technology. The new technology should be secure, seminal and maintainable for as long as possible. The first step towards selecting the best solution was creating a proof of concept, in which several options were presented to Ingenico Marketing Solutions. The purpose of this analysis was to present several suitable solutions to Ingenico Marketing Solutions. “We did intensive research and used more metrics for our analysis than our client had intended”, recalls developer Riewert Holtermann, who oversaw the project at cronn. “Besides classic metrics such as advantages and disadvantages, we also researched answers to the following questions: How active are the respective technical communities? How widespread is the software within the online service Github? How fast are security updates provided? How many developers are currently being searched via job advertisements for the technologies? And what percentage of the old code can still be used after the upgrade?”
Based on the analysis, three technologies were chosen for which cronn developed prototypes. Afterwards, an integration was executed that accessed the customer data stock and showed how compatible and complex the respective new technologies were. The choice was finally made to apply a Spring-Boot application with Thymeleaf. “This is a secure technology that will be supported for years to come and will facilitate future product development at Ingenico Marketing Solutions, as well as allow the customer to pass audits successfully”, Riewert explains the decision.
Improvements
Over a period of six months cronn developers migrated the IT system. “The complexity of the code has decreased significantly. The new system is more structured, cleaner and more consistent than its predecessor”, Riewert says. The developers involved in the project relied on proven methods for development: They applied Scrum and thus presented first results to Ingenico Marketing Solutions after only two weeks. Parallel developed, automated integration and end-to-end tests support further development.
Within the scope of a maintenance contract, cronn will continue to deal with the front-end technology and support Ingenico Marketing Solutions in the maintenance and continuous development of IT systems.
I particularly appreciated two things in working with cronn: These were the very high quality standards of all employees we worked with and the very transparent communication and project management.
