The customer was a software vendor that provides sales force automation software for sales organisations within the FMCG sector across various geographies. With plans for growth, they wanted to take their PHP/MSSQL application to the next level and complete their transition of on-premise customers to the cloud. To do this they needed to ensure that their cloud-based software would effectively scale, supporting enterprise customers and higher transactional volumes.
The Pain
While the solution could work for larger customers, it required a customised software configuration running on dedicated hardware. This solution would not work in the long term, due to the complexity of the setup and the increased infrastructure costs.
The Solution
Stratigence was contacted to provide advice on the most effective means to scale the solution. This was achieved but setting up a performance test environment to simulate the current peak load of the application. Once the peak load could be simulated, a number of improvements were identified that could be easily integrated into the software and server configuration with minimal risk. Each improvement was tested to establish the improvement it provided before a final list of candidate improvements was decided. The final candidates were built into a short release cycle and implemented to production.
An agile approach to the performance improvements was adopted ensuring that a full review was completed at the end of each week with an opportunity to decide whether enough gains had been made or to carry on and identify further improvements. After the initial performance environment had been set up it only required 3 weeks to identify necessary improvement to meet the project goals and decide on a plan to implement to production.
The Outcome
The performance improvements identified resulted in application performance doubling and in some cases improving by 600%. All but one of the improvements were considered low risk and could be deployed with the next release of the software.
As a result the engagement concern and cost of scaling the solution has been removed and both the technical and business teams are happy to complete their transition to the cloud and target larger customers. Everyone is comfortable that they have a proven solution that can scale to meet their business objectives.
Figure 1. A business friendly dashboard used to review performance results at the end of each week
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