How we helped Embrace transition to a full SaaS solution and boost performance by 30%

Embrace connects digital services with the digital workplace. The system automates processes where possible but relies on the professionals from the client’s organization when required. With their solutions for self-service customer portals, customer tracking systems, and digital workspaces, Embrace is reinventing human work every day.

The challenge: Migrating from the legacy system to the cloud

When Embrace first contacted us, they were looking for a tech partner that would help them migrate from their legacy system to the cloud. They wanted to build a bespoke system that is scalable, stable, and equipped to handle 400 clients effortlessly and fully prepared for future growth.

This is a highly dynamic project, where key goals and objectives are constantly changing as different issues and opportunities occur.

The project itself is immense – it can be divided into three main products:

• Social – represents an intranet application that enables company employees to communicate effortlessly and be up to date with the latest news. It makes it easy for employees to create various groups and chats in order to collaborate with peers, exchange ideas, and ask questions. The social intranet is the foundation of the digital workspace of tomorrow – gathering ideas, collecting information, and creating a unique knowledge base to prevent important data from being lost.
• Portals – the product consists of multiple tools for creating portals, which can be shown within the application or as separate websites. Consisting of widgets, as their structural units, Portals help users organize their information and content in a way that makes sense for them. Most importantly, portals are fully customizable, from adding and editing content to changing brand elements such as colors or typography.
• Customers – enables housing companies to communicate with their customers. It supports multi-channel communication, including chat, email, and phone, as well as provides relevant information about tenants, rentals, contracts, and much more. All of this data can be monitored from a single, centralized place. Employees at their client’s companies can communicate easier and solve any issues smoothly and efficiently.

A dedicated team of 20 software engineers

The client was looking for an extension of their in-house team. Experienced software engineers who understand the project to its core. Professionals they can rely on. Most importantly, they were seeking a dedicated team that understands their requirements, can quickly familiarize themselves with new technologies, and implement the best software development and security practices.

That’s exactly where Vega IT stood out. We’ve collaborated with Embrace for years, providing them with a dedicated team of 20 expert software engineers. We work side by side with their in-house developers, toward the same goal.

The solution: The transition to a full SaaS solution

The client wanted to transform their legacy system to a SaaS solution that would enhance its overall stability and efficiency.

Here is how we contributed to the project:

• We implemented centralized identity management. This involved researching available identity providers and selecting the best one for their use case. We customized software to meet their needs through extensions and modified the existing code.
• We implemented the microservices architecture and used GraphQL federation, which allowed us to break down a complex GraphQL schema into smaller pieces that can be developed independently.
• We proposed best practices and pinpointed performance gaps that were supposed to be addressed. Our team participated in decision-making processes and provided technical insights that helped them make the right decisions for the platform’s future performance.
• We implemented defined processes, optimized team organization, and fostered proactivity. Most importantly, we helped them move beyond mere task execution. For example, we encouraged them to embrace Scrum as the standard methodology for the project.

Results: Improving the system performance by at least 30%

When we started working as an extension of Embrace’s team on various projects, our common goal was to optimize them, making them faster, scalable, and stable. Our back-end developers worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the client’s team to stabilize the system and improve the codebase, making it more maintainable.

As Embrace’s technical partners, we worked with their team on the optimization of the architecture that had been initially set up. That way, the system performance was increased by at by at least 30%.

Technical details:

Portal provider back-end:

• .NET (C#)
• Node.js (will be removed)
• PostgreSQL
• Azure Pipelines
• Terraform
• Helm
• Kubernetes
• Docker

Shared services:

• OAuth
• OIDC
• Terraform
• Helm
• Kubernetes
• Docker
• GraphQL
• Apollo federation
• .NET (C#)
• Java
• Node.js