By Phil Dias, Tier1 Financial Solutions & Parijat Agarwal, Metacube
What’s the recipe for successful offshore partnerships in software development? And why bother searching for one? Tier1 and Metacube have been working together for more than seven years. The collaboration has led to tangible results for both sides, while accelerating the path to innovation. But it doesn’t just happen overnight.
Tier1’s partnership with Metacube has created a more flexible, profitable and efficient user experience with purpose built security and workflows designed specifically for capital markets, investment banking and investment management professionals.
Metacube, for example, has dedicated teams assigned specifically to client projects. Adding offshore developers speeds up the go-to-market timetable and adds a critical layer of knowledge in shaping best practices to enhance product capabilities and streamlines customization of those enhancements for your organization. In the end, cost is optimized while not compromising on value delivered.
There’s constant evolution among all market participants. With global demands rising in the industry in the face of regulatory change, a global delivery team is necessary to rapidly support these clients’ needs. At the Tier1 Capital Markets Lounge at Dreamforce, attendees at one of the panel discussions overwhelmingly chose efficiency as the most important driver of innovation in capital markets.
Keys to a Beneficial Offshore Partnership
There are several factors that need to be considered when trying to align with the right development partner such as brand familiarity, reliability and credibility, skill set diversification, and their ability to produce research around use cases with emerging technologies, including natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and native cloud applications.
Diversified Skill Set
Offshore development partners specialize in many areas, including proprietary plugins, which are essential to differentiating oneself in the market. Plugins deliver greater configurability and customization opportunities while allowing for enhanced scalability. As Tier1 works with Metacube on implementation, integration, and quality assurance, the Company’s flexible framework provides Metacube with the foundation to build proprietary mobile and web plugins and integrations.
Metacube is focused on meeting customer needs through continuous feedback. They accomplish this by utilizing Agile processes that focus on timeliness, accountability for meeting deadlines, increasing efficiency, and allowing for strategy realignment.
Manual and automated testing of an agile project goes through several phases before being rolled out. Test automation is the key to ensuring effective Agile development and the development team doesn’t leave when the project is done. They assist with technical support and guide clients through questions and issues. This mitigation and risk management is a crucial part of an offshore developer’s role.
Reliability and Credibility
It is imperative to find an offshore team that provides quality work while consistently meeting deadlines. While the perception may be that distance can sever communication and impede progress toward accomplishing goals, Tier1’s relationship with Metacube has exceeded expectations. Since offshore development partners play such a pivotal role in the go-to-market pace, Metacube’s commitment to delivering a quality product on schedule has been its most defining quality.
What’s more is that practically the same group of Metacube engineers who have worked with Tier1 from the beginning of the relationship are still there. An offshore partner’s retention of team members could be one of its most underrated aspects and a team that’s been together for a long time is likely to excel at meeting deadlines, responding to issues, and producing quality work. This is the foundation on which the successful partnership stands.
Understanding Your Brand
Metacube is equipped with about 450 Salesforce engineers and they have certified professionals with more than 300 Salesforce certifications. For Tier1, it was exactly what was needed – Salesforce expertise. While Metacube’s experienced engineers thoroughly understand the implementation of Salesforce across enterprises of all sizes, their knowledge base extends far beyond that with hundreds of certifications in important programs such as Mulesoft and Splunk.
As sell-side and buy-side firms, as well as fintech providers, look to take their technology stack to the next level, offshore development partners like Metacube can add significant upgrades to existing products. This ultimately allows customers to focus on integral areas of the business that will add more time to drive innovation and keep them on the path to achieving greater growth and scalability.
To learn more about how Tier1’s offshore partnership with Metacube can help your business, contact us today.