Advantage Software Partners With D3V To Modernize Legacy Software And Accelerate Product Development Cycle Via Google Cloud

Overview

Advantage Software is a family-owned business developing court reporting software since 1987. The company is a pioneer technological innovator for court reporters.

Advantage Software has created various products for the reporting industry, including the AccuCap closed-captioning program, in addition to their most popular market-leading computer-aided transcribing program for court reporters called Eclipse. The firm recently transitioned to a cloud-native serverless platform integrated with automated CI/CD for imparting better user experience and increasing the efficiency and reliability of their application development and deployment lifecycle.

The Challenge

Challenge 1 – Lack of scalability and complex UI/UX
One major pain that Advantage Software experienced was their inability to scale. Their legacy software was not cloud-based, and wasn’t easily accessible at all times. The software also wasn’t delivering outputs with the speed and accuracy as it was capable of. Moreover, customers were struggling to understand the user workflow thanks to a cluttered UI/UX.

Challenge 2 – Long time-to-market for newer products
In a fiercely competitive industry, Advantage Software also struggled with long time to market cycles. In order to maintain their competitive edge, they were in need of accelerating the product development process for the three different software product initiatives. This included launching new features, getting rid of bugs as they developed, and taking prompt action on user feedback..

Our Solution

D3V performed a comprehensive audit and identified the problems preventing Advantage Software from reaching potential success. Following this, D3V engineers, with their deep technical knowledge of providing software and cloud architecture guidance, decided that the best course of action would be to migrate the legacy software infrastructure to Google Cloud.

D3V worked with the client as a full-service Google Cloud services partner, further supported by certified Google Cloud Application Developers with expertise in Cloud Native Development. Our professionals also automated the build process of their three new software products using a CI/CD pipeline. An automated CI/CD pipeline enhanced the process of developing their applications, notably during the delivery and deployment phases and the integration and testing phases.

D3V’s UX/UI designers spearheaded a complete front-end development revamp. Furthermore, the overall project panned out smoothly thanks to the Agile principles implemented by D3V’s certified scrum masters.

These steps toward modernization came with a bunch of new benefits, including:

• Faster release cycles with Cloud Run as a No-Ops serverless platform integrated with CI/CD automation; and,
• Lower costs since the application rarely had significant traffic during non-business hours. Under the “Cloud Run” pricing model, the client would only be billed for actual application usage.

Here’s a breakdown of the various technologies that D3V leveraged across the project:

• Frontend: ReactJS, Bootstrap, and Material UI.
• Backend: Golang, Go-swagger, Open API & GORM.
• DevOps: Cloud Run, Google Cloud SQL & Cloud Build

Key Accomplishments

D3V is proud to have achieved the following milestones with Advantage Software, as highlighted below:

• Accelerated two frontend applications to the point where the internal team at Advantage Software has taken over them and continued development on their end.
• Fast-tracked the client’s product roadmap through this partnership.
• Designed and built the Keyprog frontend admin tool.
• Structured the UI/UX mockups for the Keyprog frontend admin tool based on the description given by the client during our requirements-gathering process.
• Designed and built backend APIs based on the mockups and requirements for the frontend application to consume mass data volumes.
• Enabled the designed application to run in Google Cloud with Managed Databases for different projects within different environments, increasing potential for scalability.
• Revolutionized the application development and deployment lifecycle with CI/CD automation in multiple phases, increasing overall efficiency, reliability, and innovation while reducing costs.