Global Agricultural Company: Multicloud Application Ecosystem
In this case study
A competitive edge
A Global Agricultural Company was faced with trying to manage and analyze overwhelming amounts of data to gain valuable insights that would guide its business strategy. The Company was looking for a way to adopt deeper analytics to identify customer patterns and trends, enabling better decision-making that would lead to innovative business outcomes.
Specifically, its objective was to find a programmatic way to help sales individuals highlight and direct selling efforts, creating a shift in both sales and marketing efforts to increase business impact.
The company needed a software development team that could not only build high-quality applications, but that could show them how to scale existing systems in the cloud and teach them how to deliver and maintain reusable applications. Without a system in place to manage its data, the company feared it would fall behind.
Implementing such an IT solution on its own would be extremely challenging. The agricultural data possessed differing levels of complexity and the Company lacked sufficient data center resources to manage it.
Empowering data across teams
To solve for the Company's data needs, development teams from WWT implemented a multicloud application ecosystem that focused on providing and analyzing large amounts of historic and current data.
We developed a multifunctional solution to fit the Company's needs consisting of three distinct projects. Each project revolved around a vital area of business — external customers, internal personnel/sales and product data — and utilized public cloud providers Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
These distinct projects shared a common element: a cloud application ecosystem.
Our Application Services developers produced cloud-based applications for each separate business area. They focused on moving data out of legacy or source systems, such as Salesforce, Oracle and SAP, and repositioning data in a way that drove business value.
We also focused on building highly scalable application programming interfaces (APIs) and streaming systems that provided near real-time updates. This was critical for deriving actionable insights from data and giving the Company a better understanding of internal needs, external needs and product data.
Our solution needed to align with the practices of several teams across the Company, including IT security, the API platform group, Kafka management, cloud operations, data stewardship, application development and IT leadership. To achieve this clarity, WWT developers met with each group when a new major application functionality was being developed to ensure all concerns and policies were addressed.
Analytics for evolving needs
After implementing WWT's multicloud application ecosystem, the Company now has the data assets needed to meet changing business trends head on. The Company's ability to generate actionable insights based on their data has enhanced the effectiveness of selling and optimized resources, improving not only the functionality of internal sales and marketing efforts, but the overall experience with end customers as well.
It has also enabled the Company to offer more advanced technology features to customers. For instance, customers can now be advised on the best product to use in their specific location, track invoiced orders throughout the process, easily access the dealer network and apply for financing online.
WWT's cloud application solution has allowed the Company to better use its data in a way that's both beneficial to them and their customers — positioning the business to achieve its overarching goal of gaining a competitive advantage in the market.