A small showcase of success stories

• Creating a Global Leader in the Pharmaceutical Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Space
• Executing a Novel Product for a Design Services Company
• Building Comprehensive Product Suites for a Fortune 500 Auto Major
• Building the Product Backbone for a Leading Social Networking Portal

 

Creating a Global Leader in the Pharmaceutical Key Opinion Leader (KOL) Space

The Client

The client delivers best-practices driven solutions for successful strategic management of Key Opinion Leader (KOL) relationships, Medical Science Liaison (MSL) performance and speaker bureau execution. They have offices in the US, Asia and Europe and serve customers in six continents. Their clientele includes numerous Fortune 500 companies.

Backgrounder

Pharmaceutical companies require various kinds of opinion leaders for various processes and to reach out to various audiences. Their research, development, trials and product marketing campaigns depend heavily on these KOLs. The key challenge here is the sheer diversity of KOLs and attributes that typify them. Software in this area has to be flexible, robust and highly scalable to accommodate present and future needs.

The Challenge

The client was at the head of a game changing idea and great software was at the heart of it. Its first technology partner had not turned in encouraging results. To be able to sign up for more customers, our client would have required another year’s investment into the product. They were clearly staring at a huge potential opportunity loss.

Enter Kuliza

In came Kuliza. Kuliza had all of four days to turn in the first demo. That was handled by tweaking the existing code. From thereon, Kuliza went into biweekly demos (sprint cycles) to meet the three month deadline of completely revamping the application.

The client was comforted through the process of re-architecting the product by having daily progress monitoring sessions that demonstrated the new robust and scalable design. The demo to one of the client's prospect was a success and resulted in a two year deal for them. A journey of a fruitful strategic association and scorching pace of growth had begun for the client and Kuliza.

The Solution

Tackling the Intensive search problem

Kuliza created a highly effective entity-attribute-value schema that could be used by different customers for multiple purposes. The solution helped build scale and a high degree of universality into the product.

Information from multipe sources such as PDFs of research papers, publication summaries and abstracts, slides of presentations made, news briefings and a host of other inputs had to be synthesized. Moreover the efficacy of a KOL also needed to be tracked to be able to fine tune pitches and marketing campaigns. This required searching through large data sets of the order of hundreds of gigabytes of all types of files.

Kuliza fast-tracked the data indexing process using Solr and Lucene. Kuliza’s solution combined the rich schema specification supported by Solr and the full-text indexing and searching capability of Lucene. This gave the product, openIdentify, high performance, full-text, cross-platform search capabilities. It also provided flexibility in tackling a wide range of document fields. To accelerate the indexing process Kuliza innovatively employed Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (Amazon EC2). This web service, a virtual computing environment providing resizable compute capacity in the cloud, helped Kuliza parallelize the indexing across chosen instance types of operating systems. Further, EC2’s pay as you use approach proved to be cost effective for the client.

Tackling the access anywhere problem

A key need was the ability to access the organization’s data while commuting or while with a client. The solution had to work offline. This is a challenging problem with a lot of ongoing debate on the technology and end-user experience. Helpful literature is just not available. Kuliza created a grounds-up solution that has now gone into the product as a major feature and is a key selling point for its client.

Benefits

Creating a market leader

Within a year of association with Kuliza, the client had broken fresh ground in converted some highly coveted prospects into loyal clients. As the association deepened, the client reversed a win to loss ratio of 1:2 to 2:1 and quickly became an acknowledged market leader.

Great ROI

The architecture put in place by Kuliza serves as a base architecture for the entire product family. This gives a huge return on investment (ROI) by saving redesigning costs and serving as a template for all future products. Huge benefits accrue as products in the suite can easily interoperate and give clients a value that is more than the sum of the parts.

 

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Executing a Novel Product for a Design Services Company

The Client

The client generates immediate impact for critical business opportunities by offering strategic creative services. They operate as an agency, laboratory and an incubator to innovate brands, products and spaces for organizations.

Backgrounder

The need was to build a media centric (articles/images/videos) social networking platform. The client wanted more flexibility in their solution and more space for innovation as compared to hosted solutions. They wanted a bespoke implementation because the envisioned model was to be a combination of the service models of some of the best known social networking and social media sites.

The Challenge

• There was to be no size limit on media uploads and media type
• The videos were to be converted into a few standard formats. Once uploaded it was required that the user should be able to view the media in various resolutions
• Hundreds of videos were expected to be submitted at the same time
• The media processing was required to happen immediately with user being shown a real time progress bar.

The Solution

The operations involving media processing are CPU intensive and stand to bring the server doing down if the processing is not distributed. Thus a scalable, distributed video processing sub-system was built. A chat sub-system was built with all features of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) such as group communication (discussions in forums) as well as private messaging and data transfers

 

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Agile Processes in Action with a Global Automotive Major

Kuliza worked as a technology partner with a large global product realization organization in creating various channel sales support software.

Problem Definition

The problem definition was to project one online brand identity of the auto major across over 5000 dealerships and other channel partners in the United States. Each dealer, being an independent business entity was to have the freedom to customize their website provided they retained the basic structure dictated by the auto major. That way, end customers would know where to reach out for in case they sought any help online and they would be aware of the exact workflow. The auto major on the other hand sought structured and seamless feedback for its marketing and support operations through this uniformly implemented structure.

Challenge

A large number of dealerships were huge businesses in their own right and held considerable sway on account of their market insights. Incorporating their feedback was essential for the auto major. The product had to be installed and customized and feedback had to be sought and collated for the auto major to proceed in planning to reap ROI from the product. Naturally, the project was to be implemented very fast as a host of support operations, promotion campaigns and marketing planning rode of the back of this program

Kuliza’s Solutions and Processes

Within a quarter of engaging as a technology partner, Kuliza became the owner of large and mission-critical features of the product. Kuliza contributed in planning and designing new features, estimation, development, triage and release. The team ramped up quickly both in terms of numbers and its understanding of the domain and user preferences.

The product had legacy components and integrated with several downstream processes of the auto major. Kuliza’s team’s Initial job was to improve the quality of code base, make performance improvements, write automated test cases and do a deep dive into all dependencies.

End to End Responsibilities

Kuliza engaged in product planning, authoring functional specifications, architecting and designing the product besides implementing features, authoring test cases, handling performance testing of the application and releasing and supporting the application. This resulted in a strategic tie-up and we now have a dedicated delivery center with our technology partner.

Vendor Management

Become a strategic partner also involved managing other vendors who worked on various small features of the product. Kuliza’s Agile DNA, its approach of having biweekly scrum cycles and completely transparent delivery processes helped build trust both with its technology partner as well as with the vendor ecosystem. As a result of Kuliza’s project management, the auto major was able to worked with a set of highly competent and specialized vendors who delivered high quality work and kept deadlines.

Technologies Used

Java, Spring MVC, Spring Webflow, Hibernate, Freemarker, JSP, Javascript, HTML/CSS, Omniture, JSUnit,Selenium

 

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Building the Product Backbone for a Leading Social Networking Portal

The Product

The product behind the portal was incubated in Kuliza. The opportunity in sight was to connect people through photos and videos. While following one person life in photos and videos, one can jump to stories of lives of other people that feature in those photographs or videos.

This creates an amazing context, builds cohesive communities and creates powerful referral sources. In addition, this is a one-stop place to showcase content from multiple sources on the Internet.

The Challenge and the Approach

Uploading videos in various formats and of all sizes required a scalable solution. Furthermore, Kuliza knew that online communities see exponential growth once the concept catches on.

In its solution Kuliza planned for such a growth. This planning accommodated various file types, content aggregation / mashup technologies, features of full-strength blogging software, great media compression techniques and a rich user interface that would instantly appeal to a very wide set of audience.

The Result

Kuliza’s approach towards the product design gave the product over half a million registered users within a year of its launch. Not only is the number of users on the rise, various services have also been built around the core product.

 

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