Landmark Technology Partners Delivers BankBroker Leveraging Global Software Development Model
Landmark Technology Partners develops and implements BankBroker, an on-demand software application that enables links with partners, accelerates processes, and ultimately helps grow and protect assets under management for financial broker/dealer organizations, dedicated sales force for fund or insurance companies and organizations that support independent advisors.
BankBroker is a system based on the Software-as-a Service (SaaS) platform that includes a suite of solutions for Sales Automation, Process Automation, Commission Accounting, Compliance and Risk Oversight functions along with Management and Sales reporting. BankBroker is the only software that provides a collaborative approach for Contact and Account Aggregation. BankBroker is based on an extensive rules-based architecture that allows any organization to support their business processes from the front-office to back-office.
1. Business Problem
In 2000, Landmark Technology Partners started building an innovative workflow-driven sales force automation software-as-a-service (SaaS) software for the financial broker organizations. Landmark’s confidence in the success of its business goal was driven by the understanding of its competitive advantage: the company’s SaaS platform was targeted to provide unparalleled high quality sales broker functionality for a highly competitive price.
One of the primary strategic moves in enabling competitive end-user prices was minimizing the Landmark’s operational costs by reaping the benefits of the offshore software development model.
Considering an offshore software development approach, Landmark Technology Partners faced a challenge: the company served its customers in finance, a highly regulated industry. The Landmark’s business operations, product development organization, production model and customer services required to satisfy the strict compliance guidelines of the Landmark customers.
Therefore, the primary dilemma Landmark Technology had to address was achieving the cost cutting benefits of the offshore software development model and providing effective mitigation of the offshore risks to satisfy rigorous customer regulatory requirements.
2. Approach
A few principles were laid into the foundation of the Landmark product development model with regards to the application of the offshore global development capabilities:
1. The core product knowledge, product architecture and design, implementation and deployment, customer service processes as well as software projects were owned and managed by the in-house Landmark software development organization.
2. Landmark established a long term goal of building an offshore resource capacity pool to augment the in-house development organization in working on the code development, testing and maintenance tasks.
3. Landmark laid out a strategy targeted to building a coherent global development organization led by the in-house product development team, making offshore resources a part of the organization.
4. Landmark made a decision to engage offshore teams from multiple geographic locations in Russia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan that provided a strong risk mitigating step.
5. Landmark engaged Sitrus as a primary offshore vendor that would provide the core of development resources, assisting in the management of offshore resources in other locations.
6. Landmark focused on building partnership relationships with the offshore vendors, having visibility in the offshore resource management.
In-house senior technical management executed overall project management as well as the monitoring and controlling of the tasks assigned to each offshore developer. Landmark gained high visibility into the offshore resource management. Those measures enabled to proactively plan and address potential issues that would cause customer impact...