About the Client

Our client is a global media group with over a million readers in 17 countries. In addition to its core publishing business, the company has expanded into finance, real estate, wellness, health, and leisure. To enable communication and data exchange across various products, the company maintains a platform integration engine, centralized databases, and data collection tools.

Challenge

The client needed to expand its platform integration team. The team handles IT infrastructure support and develops an integration engine – a system for data exchange between multiple enterprise-scale solutions, like:

  • Marketing orchestration platforms
  • Agency management tools
  • Content management systems
  • Order management platforms

Since Exoft has already helped modernize some of these solutions, the company brought in our Java developer and QA engineer for integration engine maintenance and enterprise database management.

Cooperation Structure

Exoft's specialists joined the team in 2023. Since then, they've been cooperating with the client's DevOps experts, data engineers, solution architects, and product owners

Although there’s a seven-hour difference, we fully adapt to the client’s business hours. We operate through secure remote access using the client’s private VPN, fully complying with all information security policies.

Workload management is the client’s responsibility. We follow Scrum methodology with two-week sprints, backlog grooming, daily standups, and retrospectives. The work is continuous, not segmented into separate phases. Given the focus on maintenance, we either implement planned improvements or quickly address incidents, requests, and inquiries.

What truly distinguishes the client’s teams is a culture of knowledge sharing. Our meetings go beyond formalities. We openly explore system details, best practices, and lessons learned.

Scope of Work

Together with the client’s team, we are developing and maintaining a platform integration service – a central hub that supports data exchange between the client’s products and internal databases. Our core responsibilities

  • Modernized components of the internal integration engine
  • Optimized separate microservices
  • Provided database management services, including query optimization, data integrity monitoring, and migration of large datasets
  • Developed and maintained API integrations, improving their speed and reliability
  • Set up system monitoring and alerting tools
  • Built automated incident response processes
  • Handled DevOps tasks and automated CI/CD pipelines
  • Analyzed the client’s existing QA practices and are now developing automated testing frameworks
  • Optimized databases for two subscription management platforms

Achieved Value

Exoft serves as a reliable development partner for the client, ready to support any internal initiative. Platform modernization is already our third project together.

Exoft efficiently onboarded the required specialists. On demand, we adapted the team size and responsibilities per client’s changing needs. We reassigned people from the client's other project or switched from full-time to part-time.

Together with the client’s in-house team, we had the following achievements:

  • Supported database operations across six enterprise-scale systems
  • Implemented monitoring tools to enable early detection of performance issues and bugs
  • Improved Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), leading to better incident response
  • Accelerated API response times
  • Ensured secure configuration and maintenance of complex system environments