Is There A Real Desire To Remove Cash From Circulation? Leading Banks In South Africa Weigh In
Helesha Moodley
- Banking, payments
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What happens when two future-focused companies combine forces? A lasting partnership is formed. Trackmatic is a niche software development company that specializes in creating solutions for the supply chain and logistics industry. It helps businesses perfect their business flow so they can deliver better. Trackmatic has always been ahead of the demand curve, seeing trends before others realize the opportunities. One of many examples of this is when it gave truck drivers cell phones and what they trademarked as “Driver-led Visibility®” in 2015. Clients told them they were “crazy”. Today, this is commonplace.
Synthesis is a software development and consulting company with an eye for innovation and high-impact technology. The company pioneered cloud in South Africa and launched the first tap-on phone technology in Africa. Trackmatic’s David Slotow’s description of the business could easily be a description of Synthesis: “We have a proven track record of being able to solve problems that longstanding players in the market have not been able to do. We follow an extraordinarily strong culture of continuous improvement and perpetual innovation.” Both companies have always asked: How do we build software for the future?
Trackmatic approached Synthesis to assist them in developing their cloud strategy which required the design of a hybrid cloud system that was secure, efficient and resilient. “Our clients need to keep paying the same amounts but need to get more value as we evolve our product offering. As always, when managing your own systems, it is challenging to correctly predict our infrastructure requirements as well as lead times and deployment considerations. Our systems and business operations must be planned well before their actual usage.
Trackmatic required a secure hybrid cloud environment that could interface with their existing on premises hardware and applications. Synthesis worked with Trackmatic to understand their business goals and required outcomes, as well as the risks and possible compliance requirements. Once this assessment phase was comprehensively understood, Synthesis then began to develop the technical requirements and architectures to ensure Trackmatic’s needs were met and exceeded. “We chose AWS because of Synthesis more than Synthesis because of AWS,” says Slotow. Everything put in place was designed for speed, agility and innovation at pace. Synthesis and Trackmatic worked together to take the first step in their cloud journey which was to deploy a Control Tower environment in AWS which is not only best practice but the fastest way to go to cloud for a large organization.
The Control Tower environment helps customers quickly create an automated, secure, multi-account AWS environment that truly enforces best practices and account separation for added security, development environment as well as staging and production environments. Together, the companies worked on automating certain developer services such as CI/CD pipelines, and deploying all infrastructure as code (IaC) which allowed Trackmatic to not only deploy faster but also track changes and re-use code for if needed for similar deployments.
A best practice when using cloud platforms is to not only deploy infrastructure as code but also to adopt (IaC) DevOps practices within the developer teams which when applied correctly has been proven to show 200x times improvement on code deployments. Teams can deploy smaller changes more regularly instead of substantial changes less frequently which also impacts rollback times should something go wrong, according to the State of DevOps Report. The faster a company can deploy code, the faster it can innovate, release new functionality, and build for the future.
By going to the AWS cloud, Trackmatic overcame the constraints of their on-premises infrastructure and was able to “have the best of both worlds,” says Slotow. “In the 18 months since we worked with Synthesis, we have a Well-Architectured environment in terms of our infrastructure. We have high availability, We have got trusted custody that the AWS accounts management provisioning security is taken care of by people that have competence, and we have not had to hire those resources. I think for us the largest benefit is only to come.” Together, the software companies have achieved scale while managing costs. “Synthesis was able to accommodate our spending. They managed the cost constraints without compromising excellence with the understanding that if something were built well, it would not break and if something went wrong, there was a partner ready to jump in.
“Synthesis did not just solve a technical problem we had, they galvanized, supported, and empowered us to go on this AWS journey with confidence knowing we had the best minds looking at the solutions for us. Working with Synthesis has proven to us that choosing the correct cloud partner is vital. It has allowed us to improve the running of our business products and services. The partnership was also about ensuring Trackmatic, as an SME, could excel just as much as an enterprise company with a larger budget. “Synthesis understood the strategic opportunity and looked to advance Trackmatic’s technical learning and opportunity.” “What makes Trackmatic unique is its approach. They build their technology around learning about what an industry-leading customer needs and solving their problems with the belief that if they solve for them, then they will be solving for others as well. This is a long-term partnership, and we are excited to see what we will achieve together,” says Synthesis Naseem Ahmed, Cloud Enablement Practice Lead.
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