Client Profile

Founded in 2009 and based in Sudbury, MA, Vuuch is a privately-held enterprise social software provider.  Vuuch’s deliverable-centric social operations platform uses “social @ work” to improve business performance. Vuuch is the only enterprise social software that connects people based on deliverables, rather than relationships. Vuuch can run standalone or be integrated into desktop and enterprise applications used across the enterprise. Vuuch connects anyone anywhere, improves how work gets done, captures knowledge and fosters innovation. Vuuch is focused principally on interactions related to a customer’s product.

Vuuch keeps discussions focused by placing business deliverables at the center of the discussion. Consider a typical software design project. There are many components that make up a software product and many stakeholders who need to be involved in the discussion of those components. Vuuch allows you to track the tasks and issues that are pertinent to your project and have threaded discussions with the right participants. You can contribute to these discussions via the Vuuch web application, integrated desktop add-ins, and over email.

For more information, visit Vuuch online at www.vuuch.com.

Business Situation

As IT service companies mature it is not uncommon to have a ‘changing of the guard’ from time to time.   Such was the case when Vuuch reached out to Deerwalk. They had a two year old platform in production and needed a new technical team to come in hit the ground running. 

There were immediate concerns ranging from the hosted environment stability to source code management. It was important to the client that Deerwalk take control of the environment and gain an understanding of all the moving parts involved. They were up against a mandatory instance restart at Amazon’s EC2 cloud service and there was concern that after six months of straight uptime the system might not come back up cleanly. Also while they had an existing release in production there was an incomplete set of new features for the next release that Deerwalk had to understand, finish, and plan for release.

Solution

Deerwalk’s approach was multi-faceted. Most importantly we wanted to stand up our own EC2 instances running the client’s platform. This allowed us to understand all the moving parts involved and ensure we had a secure and stable environment to move forward with.Secondly we needed to ensure that the source code and platform processes we had in possession were secure from a vulnerabilities perspectives. Deerwalk was able to accomplish these goals in a matter of a day or two.

Longer term it was important that Deerwalk work with Vuuch to understand their product and business goals. By working with the client Deerwalk was able to finish the partially completed work for the new release. We were also able to implement several new features as well as a complete overall of the user experience.

Benefits

Deerwalk was a logical fit for Vuuch. We host our own infrastructure exclusively on Amazon EC2 and are intimately familiar with managing such an environment. Additionally we have been building Grails applications since 2009 and in fact use the framework in two of our own products. This gave us the ability to quickly assess the situation and take the necessary steps to ensure a secure and stable platform.

The onshore/offshore model works well for many clients including Vuuch. We are able to coordinate 24 hours of coverage in emergency situations. During crunch time hand off between the onshore and offshore team creates a continuous working entity to resolve high priority issues. During normal day to day development client coordination can happen during US business hours and the resulting impact can typically be reviewed the following morning as the offshore team has worked through the night.

One of the most exciting parts of the project was being able to use the Vuuch platform to track the discussion of tasks and issues. This gave us a unique opportunity to really become stakeholders not only into the development effort but also the business process behind the product. Deerwalk places a premium on understanding our clients business as experience tells us it results in a much better result on the engineering side. This can be hard with some clients but with Vuuch it was a natural fit for a software product and services company like Deerwalk.

Results

After two months of hard work release 5.0 of the Vuuch platform was released to market. Vuuch has a stable and secure production environment as well as staging and development regions. Their efforts are supported by a team consisting of US based technical leadership, offshore developers, UI designers, quality assurance engineers, and project management. Vuuch has an incredible vision for their company and Deerwalk is very excited to help them realize their goals in 2012 and beyond.

Client Testimonial

“As an early stage start-up, it is critical that our partners act as not just as a partner but a strategic member of the Vuuch team.   From the beginning, Deerwalk’s engagement model was all about delivering value and being a strategic member of the product development efforts.  The combination of the strong interaction with the local leadership and the great talent of their offshore facilities has been a key element of Vuuch’s recent product releases and our future product roadmap.”

Technologies Used:

• Grails
• Amazon EC2
• Tomcat
• SenchaExtJS
• MySQL