Need Ruby Developers in 72h?

The customer

Operating globally, the company is a leading producer of fully automated solutions for the building component manufacturing industry. With patented smart robotics technology under the hood, the organization provides a revolutionary roof truss production system.

The need

When the customer turned to Altoros, it had an existing CAD-like software—for roof truss designers—implemented as a proof of concept. However, the solution’s functionality was not mature enough to be used in production.

Collaborating with Altoros, the company wanted to optimize the existing functionality, as well as develop some business-critical components.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• The system’s immature API with its unpredictable behaviour might cause failures at any step of the truss production line.
• To avoid redesigning defective trusses from scratch, it was important to ensure control of individual truss elements.
• The system’s performance had to be stable even in case of a network error.
• The solution had to be compatible both with the Windows and Linux operating systems.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the company turned its proof of concept into an enterprise-grade solution capable of customizing the sequence of steps performed by a robot at the truss production line and taking a defective truss element off the production line. With improved API, the system is fault tolerant and minimizes risks of unexpected failures at production.

The customer

Based in the USA, the company is a provider of independent benchmarking services around employee retirement planning. Founded in 2007, the customer offers 240,000+ retirement income plans to over 200+ organizations.

The need

When the customer turned to Altoros, all the calculations behind pension planning were performed in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. This approach was both time- and effort-inefficient, as well as highly prone to human error as all the calculation formulae were created manually.

Collaborating with Altoros, the company wanted to develop a solution for automated calculations of retirement plans.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• The company offered highly customized plans, which involved sophisticated calculations for multiple scenarios. As the calculations were interconnected and affected each other, as well as the final result, it was important to elaborate a comprehensive logic behind them.
• The calculation speed across hundreds of organizations must not exceed one minute.

• 30

  seconds

• 8

  calculators

• 240,000

  plans

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer automated the calculations behind retirement income planning. With 8 calculators responsible for specific scenarios, it is now possible to perform simultaneous calculations across hundreds of organizations in just 30–40 seconds.

The customer

Likefolio.com is an application based on the concept “invest in what you like,” which helps users to find potential investment opportunities through analyzing brand awareness in social networks. It aggregates conversations, status updates, likes, and check-ins from social networks into a proprietary database. Then it links these keywords and phrases to publicly traded companies and translates the data into investment ideas.

The need

SwanPowers, LLC turned to Altoros to apply best practices in cloud transformation Ruby development to their existing system in order to satisfy the high requirements to the level of concurrency, load, response times, etc.

The challenge

The Web site was based on a distributed architecture that was not able to scale as expected. In addition, there were several issues with DB contention and background jobs.

It was estimated that the solution would have to serve 10,000 users simultaneously with at least 100 new user registrations per minute.

Every new user would need to view a partial portfolio right after signing up. The system had to interact with APIs of multiple social networks and remain within the limits of request quotas. It also had to apply complex business logic to extract investment information from social network data.

Additionally, LikeFolio profiles of every existing user had to be synchronized with all the latest updates on their social networks.

The outcome

Thanks to the improvements introduced by our team, the customer was able to launch several marketing campaigns without being afraid of performance issues due to increased traffic. The application’s overall uptime and performance have been improved significantly.

Taking into account the LikeFolio’s focus on social networks, Altoros made sure that it complies with the required API quota/limits.

The customer

When installing electrical equipment in houses, it is crucial to abide by standards such as IEC to ensure safety. To achieve compliance, contractors select an optimal set of devices (light dimmers, thermal comfort tools, charging stations, etc.) offered by different wholesalers to design a reliable electrical installation at homes. With the abundance of available equipment, it is usually effort-intensive to check appliances in stock, compare relevant information (prices, etc.), and assemble solution packages.

Recognizing the issue, El-verdi—a Norwegian provider of software for electrical companies—wanted to develop a platform that facilitates sales management of installation services. Aiming to lead the market in Norway, the company also wanted to onboard furniture/plumbing contractors as customers.

The need

Comprising mostly experts in the electrical business, the company lacked the necessary talent in development. Relying on Ruby-on-Rails expertise at Altoros, the customer wanted to build a highly performant and scalable system to deliver it to 190+ pilot installation companies.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• Multiple installation companies would store sensitive information (e.g., login, passwords, sales statistics, etc.) in the system. This way, it was crucial to ensure proper security.
• The system had to be integrated with EFObasen, a Norwegian base of electrical products, storing details about prices, stock status, etc. Since the system would deal with large volumes of data due to the integration, the ability to withstand high loads without compromising performance was critical.

• 190+

  companies onboarded

• 530,000

  product items

• 0.5 s

  response times

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer delivered a production-grade web platform—compliant with the IEC standard—improving marketing operations for 190+ companies that added 530,000 electrical items for sale. The provider can now offer the product both as a whole system and standalone customizable modules, increasing revenue streams. The optimizations in place enabled unparalleled performance with response times during user interaction reduced to 0.5 seconds. The provider received a positive feedback from pilot installation companies and is now presenting the solution to 200 contactors in the furniture/plumbing market.

The customer

The company is a U.S. provider of currency hedging and exchange execution services to investors and financial institutions. Since its foundation in 2013, the customer raised $4.1 million in funding.

The need

The company had a platform that facilitated currency hedging and asset management to mitigate risks imposed by currency fluctuations. Nine global corporations were using the platform to offset potential losses on investments due to exchange rates. At some point, the customer recognized value in white-labeling its product. As part of this plan, the organization partnered with one of the leading financial holding companies in the world, growing its clientele to 95 corporations.

Each of these corporations had different processes, systems, and technology stacks that the platform needed to easily integrate and comply with. This required introducing a lot of customizations in an agile manner.

Relying on Altoros, the customer wanted to automate and speed up feature delivery. With the white-labeling strategy in force, the company also sought scalability, high availability, and ease of maintenance.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• As the platform analyzed sensitive financial information, ensuring proper data security was crucial.
• It was important to maintain high integrability of the product due to different internal processes, technology stacks, etc., of corporations using the system.

• 1 week

  from idea to production

• 2x–4x

  faster delivery

• 2x

  less infrastructure costs

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer was able to successfully execute its white-labeling strategy by offering a FinTech product that eases an adoption curve, features high integrability, and minimizes customization. The migration to a cloud-native PaaS that has a mature ecosystem of services enabled the company to reduce release time by 2x–4x, cut down expenses on infrastructure maintenance by 2x, as well as ensure scalability and high availability. Thanks to a variety of the implemented security measures, the organization can also address the primary concerns of the financial industry.

The customer

Established in 2016, the company is a Germany-based provider of flight refund services. Operating globally, the organization helps to get compensation for delayed and cancelled flights in just 48 hours.

The need

The customer had a claim management system built on top of the legacy technology stack. This lead to multiple errors at different steps of data analysis while the system evaluated whether or not a passenger was entitled to compensation.

Cooperating with Altoros, the customer wanted to optimize сlaim processing at each of the 13 validations steps.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• Due to a poorly designed business logic, flight-related data extracted from 6 external services was processed incorrectly.
• The website loading speed was too low (30 scoring points according to PageSpeed Insights) to keep leading positions in Google Search results.
• A third-party service, which provided weather data, was to be deprecated.

• 15,000

  users per year

• 2.5x

  speed improvement

• 13

  validation steps

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer optimized data processing of its flight refund service at each of the 13 validations steps, enabling 15,000 users per year to get timely compensation for a delayed/cancelled flight. With the speed improvement by 2.5x, the solution’s website was able to retain its leading positions in Google Search results.

The customer

A Belgian IT vendor turned to Altoros to build a BPM system for thousands of students and teachers.The project is a customizable BPM system for managing educational and executive processes in a Belgian school.

The company is an independent IT vendor located in EU (Belgium) that builds Ruby-, RoR-, and JavaScript-based systems.

The need

The customer turned to Altoros to develop a Web system for managing educational and executive processes in a Belgian school. The organization already had a legacy Silverlight-based app that lacked flexibility and had poor performance. The system should have been integrated with two governmentalservices: KBI (which provides access to students’ personal data) and DaVinci(which aggregates data about courses, certification, etc.).

In addition, the customer wanted to develop a similar white-label BPM system that would allow for managing abstract entities (e.g., students and courses), processes (triggered tasks), and forms (data inputs/views).

The challenges

In the course of the project, the following challenges were defined:

• Since analysts may set up and change data structure and relations, retrieving, writing, and presenting data can become a non-trivial task. The problem escalates when working with objects connected through indirect relations.
• Most existing BPM systems/tools (e.g., Bonita) do not support service integration and customization of forms in real time. They are limited to a set of simple forms with basic interoperability and are hard to maintain.
• Availability of the system in the offline mode implied proper data synchronization, with changes saved in a queue.
• Dealing with personal data, the system should be highly secure.

The outcome

The system has been successfully implemented in the Belgian school. Daily, it is used by thousands of students, teachers, and administrative personnel. This customizable solution allows for saving tens of thousands of euros on expensive BPM/ERP suites with excessive functionality.Flexibility of the application enables to easily maintain the system and integrate it with third-party services. It is planned to enable system’s deployment to cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, people with little or no technical background can manage and customize the system,using the declarative languages written by our engineers.

In the end, partnership with Altoros allowed the customer to develop a white-label solution tailored to BPM needs of education, healthcare, finance, insurance, and other industries—thus, creating an additional revenue channel. The customer has built a number of POCs for several organizations.

The customer

The customer is a Web resource that provides distance learning and online examinations on a number of medical disciplines, including Family Practice, General Pediatrics, General Surgery, Internal Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and SPEX. The multiple choice questions, detailed explanations, and the possibility to create self-study exams are powered by the sophisticated test engine.

The need

To avoid cheating, breaches of privacy, malware, or any other security incidents, the customer came across an idea to integrate a browser security application with the Exam Master solution. A third-party Web browser lockdown solution selected for this project would disable opening new windows, copy/pasting information, screen sharing, accessing other applications, etc.

The challenges

Implementing a secure handshaking procedure between the main system and the security add-on became one of the most challenging tasks of the project. This was caused by using very specific cookies that had to be encrypted in the BF-ECB mode. To enable launching the security applications on different Web pages of the system, the team was to make some minor, yet very specific, changes to the application's code. Since the add-on does not work in the virtualized environments, physical machines were used to test the system.

The outcome

To implement a handshaking procedure, we used the encryption library and made some changes to the code. With these improvements, the new add-on does not affect the behavior of the main system. The embedded browser locks down the testing environment; this eliminates cheating and provides objective assessment of the results.