ELITEX

Zippia provides online recruitment services. The company offers placements in engineering, executive management, restaurants, healthcare, sales, construction, and education.

With the use of AI and ML they visualise a potential career map and provide all the information that users might need.

Among other things, you can discover:

• The career paths that pay the highest
• The skills you need to get hired and promoted
• How long people typically hold each job
• The companies that hire the most
• How your path changes with a particular company or degree

The challenge

When Zippia decided to approach ELITEX they needed help with migrating from AngularJS to React, as site load speed is very important for their business. Moreover, Zippia works with a large amount of data, so they needed help in processing it. Finally, the customer required UI/UX design services to improve their users’ experience while continuing to design new components and pages.

Zippia was looking for specialists who could:

• work together at the same office;
• easily integrate and efficiently collaborate with a multicultural team.

The solution

We started with involving our full-stack JavaScript engineers, who closely collaborated with the customer’s developers and helped them with migrating to React. Since our cooperation was successful, Zippia has started sharing increased responsibilities with our team.

As a result, the remote team expanded and now includes:

• Full-stack Javascript engineers;
• Data engineer;
• UI/UX designer.

The result

After a long period of cooperation, we built a strong team that continues helping Zippia to create a unique job service.

A team at ELITEX:

• Closely work with customer’s product managers to discuss new features and provide own suggestions;
• Releases new features every month;
• Conducts business trips to Bay Area (California) to clearly understand the client’s needs and better integrate with the in-house team;
• Continuously works hard to help Zippia achieve its goals.

Our client is a market-leading provider of IP video and digital signage technology that helps organisations to harness the power of video to engage, inform and entertain. Its end-to-end IPTV and digital signage solutions enable users to capture TV and video content directly from any source.

With IPTV, the user can easily distribute terrestrial and satellite television and radio, videos, DVDs, digital video-on-demand (VoD), digital signage, information boards, and web content throughout the facility.

Exterity’s customers include BBC, NHS, Thomson Reuters, Dubai Airport, University College London, Stade Pierre-Mauroy, Sanofi, The Open, Six Senses Zighy Bay Oman, Royal Randwick Racecourse, Phoenix TV Beijing, and many more.

The challenge

To keep products maintained to a high level, and to keep developing new solutions, our customer decided to extend the capacity of their core engineering team by using an external service provider. The additional requirements for the potential partner included having strong Javascript and UI experience to augment its own technical expertise.

The solution

Since the start of our cooperation, the team has mainly worked on two products. The first one is an aftercare warranty solution that provides end users with software and firmware updates.

It also includes:

• access to the support team
• bug fixes
• additional user interface options.

With its help, users can maximise system performance, manage the devices, update them and improve functionality.

For this product, our JavaScript engineers have successfully developed the front-end side using the AngularJS framework, which was already used in the core app.

At every stage, our quality assurance engineer monitors the development process to make sure all the functionality works properly.

As the development of some parts of the system requires testing on physical devices, e.g., special commercial TVs or customers’ own media players, such hardware was set up in the ELITEX office so that the team could work efficiently.

The second product is a great video analytics tool, offering access to various statistics including the number and duration of views, etc.

As this product was new and had to be developed from scratch, the decision was made to build it with modern tools:

• React framework on the front-end side
• Node.js on the back-end.

The result

Currently, the team consists of:

• JavaScript developers of various levels
• QA engineer
• Project manager

The main task of the team is the extension of the customer’s product functionality and supporting the existing apps.

As a result, a complex of Exterity’s solutions became even stronger which allows the company to fulfil the needs of existing customers and engage with new customers around the world.

Our customer offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hotel software solution that seamlessly integrates property management, global distribution, bookings and marketing. Its clients are independent hoteliers, small hotel chains and hotel management companies.

In this SaaS, they can find property management systems, booking engines, channel management and reporting solutions. These features are all in a single location, which allows users to have greater control in managing hotels, distributing rooms online and performing other daily tasks.

The key features of the platform are:

• Property management system
• Commission-free booking engine
• Native GDS integration
• Revenue manager
• Credit card processing
• Data security
• Customizable reports

The challenge

Our client always:

• permanently improves the software quality
• continuously adds new features
• provides customization services.

For core product development as well as side projects, the company actively uses external services and remote engineers. This approach makes it possible to build new features and extend the platform much faster in reaction to market needs and clients’ enquiries.

While having offices in the US and India plus a couple of software development vendors across the globe, the customer still needed a strong partner who could provide high-quality services and a team of top-level engineers.

When the client contacted us, it was crucial for them to hire only senior software engineers who could work in one office.

The solution

At the beginning, with our team augmentation service, the client’s expertise was reinforced by mostly senior front-end engineers.

Later on, after a successful phase of UI development, the customer decided to extend the team with backend and QA engineers to build a more autonomous team in Ukraine.

At the start of our cooperation, Elitex team was managed by team leads on the client’s side. However, with its expansion, it was agreed that managerial roles would be defined on the ELITEX side as well, adding local team lead positions.

The ELITEX team is involved in:

• core product development
• frontend and backend development
• code clean-up
• Refactoring
• quality assurance (QA)

As it was important to maintain smooth communication with the customer’s USA office, our engineers shifted their work schedule to provide significant work time coverage with the client’s timezone. That allowed Skype meetings, emails and work chats within the same business day for both the Ukrainian and US sides.

Our engineers also support the client’s development team from Asia – helping to handle the parts of work, which requires higher expertise and broader knowledge, providing the technical review, as well as consultancy. In the meantime, ELITEX is continuously looking for skilled Ukrainian engineers to extend the team. Within the hiring process, ELITEX is responsible for choosing the most suitable applicants, interviewing them and referencing the best candidates to the client, who makes the final decision.

The result

Working with ELITEX helped the customer to:

• Accelerate the development process;
• Extend the engineering department’s capacity;
• Significantly improve the code quality;
• Augment its engineering team’s expertise, especially in the UI;
• Build the right QA process.

Elitex continues to provide services to the customer and help to achieve its business goals.

The client is the North American bureau of Il Sole 24 ORE, Italy’s main financial daily newspaper, published by 24 Ore Group. In the field of services tailored to professionals and businesses, the Group enjoys a solid competitive market position thanks to its databanks, online services and training programs.

The challenge

Sites belonging to 24 Ore Group, are built with old technologies and look outdated. Moreover, their owners share the same issue as our customer – as the systems are huge, have lots of dependencies and have been developed over years, rewriting legacy apps from scratch or migrating them to new technologies would take a lot of time and even more important – a solid budget. Since from a technical perspective, the most important part of the website for readers is the customer-facing front-end, the idea was to renew only this part. To develop a solution that could be plugged into any existing web app or CMS, use its data, but display them in its own way.

In addition, the solution had to:

• Improve the accessibility of content on the web
• Provide better tools for content producers
• Meet the needs of both users and search engines
• Offer a cost-effective platform

The solution

The ELITEX team didn’t want to start with the traditional approach of building apps for the web. Instead, we rethought the architecture and decided to go another way. The chosen approach was more similar to that of building a mobile app.

We chose JavaScript as a main language. On top of JavaScript itself, it was decided to use AngularJS, Node.js and Sails.js. From the project management perspective, the scrum pattern was chosen so the team was able to show the customer the interim results each sprint.

The system was built with a microservice architecture. That means that the server-side app consists of two parts:

• REST API that responds to users’ requests.
• Service that gets content from external data sources, parses them and stores them in our database.

These services communicate with the help of queues and can be easily scaled. Our developers used a MongoDB database, which can handle large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

The specific architecture allows most of the pages to be loaded without any delay at all, meaning the application is blazingly fast. It was accomplished as a big part of the logic, as well as templates, are preloaded and cached on the frontend.

The user’s browser loads it only once during the first visit to the site. When the user opens any data on the app, there is no need to render the page on the server and load everything from the beginning. The server works as a REST API, returning only raw data. This includes the newly published content – the site loads all the latest data at once. It is a powerful approach to creating modern web applications.

The result

As a result, ELITEX has met the goal of engineering a blazingly fast, efficient and smooth state of the art system that is able to make the web faster. The platform was successfully delivered to the customer who could take it to the next level.

About the project: Felix is a cybersecurity startup, based in Singapore, that provides machine learning Next-Gen Anti-Virus to fit for all purposes.

For consumers, it assures the security of all applications on the computer and prevents any malware or hackers from causing harm. Plus in High-Security mode only the applications that consumers have used, malware free, are permissible to run.

For business and enterprise, it’s flexible and easily adaptable to suit any needs whilst maintaining extremely high-security assurance.

Our role: Full stack web development in cooperation with customer’s in-house team. Dedicated team.

Technologies: NodeJS, Express, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, C++, Angular

Customer’s Location: Singapore / Australia

Kallik is a global provider of labelling and artwork management solutions for regulated markets such as the pharmaceutical, medical devices, cosmetics, and chemical industries.

Kallik’s labelling and artwork management solution enables large worldwide organisations to produce accurate, print-ready artwork for their packaging and labelling in no time. The integrated cloud solution centralises messaging content, stores all its type, e.g. text, symbols, and logos, as structured data, and manages it in a smooth way.

Global organisations rely on Kallik to ensure compliance, guarantee product and brand consistency and reduce the risk of product recall. A list of Kallik’s customers includes famous companies and brands from the US, UK and other countries.

The challenge

The existing version of the labelling solution was based on Java and had a powerful functionality. However, its UI was outdated and in many cases inconvenient to use.

Kallik needed to:

• Update and modernise their core web application
• Extend the application's features
• Get further ongoing development
• Get regular maintenance

As the client’s in-house development team consisted mostly of back-end developers, they lacked UI/front-end expertise to accelerate the process of system modernisation. Our customer therefore decided to augment their expertise with a remote JavaScript development team.

The solution

We began by involving our JavaScript/UI experts who closely collaborated with the customer’s API engineers and QAs.

Since the initial cooperation was successful and ELITEX had proven its trustworthy and strong technical expertise, Kallik has started sharing increased responsibilities with our team.

As a result, the remote team has grown, adding more UI/front-end developers, Java developers, and QA engineers. ELITEX also started providing back-end/API development and testing services.

Our client, one of the largest media corporations in Italy – Il Sole 24 Ore – owns and manages multiple websites. It was inconvenient for editors to search, manage and use different types of media content separately on each website when they manage multiple sites.

ImageX is a web digital library that is clear and easy to use and manage. With ImageX the user can keep images, videos, audio, and live streams in one place, even if they have multiple websites.

The challenge

The customer required a system to store media files of all types, which at the same time could be easily and rapidly integrated with customers’ websites or function autonomously.

Imagine you have an image that could be used by editors on multiple sites, in multiple designs, and seen on various devices – from mobiles to large desktop monitors. How and where would you store it properly so that it could meet all those needs? Our engineers found a solution.

The solution

Together with Il Sole 24 Ore, we agreed to build an R&D team of highly skilled front-end, back-end and quality assurance engineers that would work under the project manager’s supervision.

As the system had to be swift and reliable our engineers advised using the following technologies:

• Node.js
• Express
• MongoDB
• Elasticsearch

The result

As a result, the ImageX system eliminates the issue of storing countless media files of different sizes and types. This new digital media library saves time and relieves the headache of editors and other users, making it possible to manage and share the files between different offices and access them from any corner of the world at any time.

Peerwith is a platform for expert-led researcher services. It helps academics seeking to raise the quality of their scientific work to connect with peers who are experts in researcher services. Peerwith partners with the best publishers, societies, and institutes to help bring author services to a wide academic audience. This way researchers can improve the quality of their academic work while building lasting relationships with peers from their academic discipline.

The challenge

The platform lacked the capacity to deal with a growing number of partners and users. When the customer contacted us for the first time, the startup was in need of software development services for marketplace expansion and the development of new features. Peerwith also needed the flexibility to scale the team up and down according to the development capacity required at any particular phase of the project.

The solution

ELITEX and Peerwith started cooperating in 2017. Before that, our client tried the services of multiple freelancers and other software development companies. ELITEX offered a more consistent approach to the work and the client decided to stay with us. Over the years, ELITEX was flexible to the needs of the customer. The development team consisted of developers of various levels and its size was changing based on the workload. ELITEX has also proven a strong ability to prepare and mentor the newcomers to the project. While ELITEX was managing and motivating the team members from its side, from the customer’s perspective remote engineers were managed by Peerwith’s CTO, who communicated with the team on a regular basis, setting priorities and managing the tasks.

We used the following technologies:

Backend

• Node.js
• Express
• MongoDB
• Elasticsearch

Frontend

• AngularJS
• Angular 2+
• Polymer
• HTML/CSS

Webapps were deployed with AWS (Amazon Web Services), which allowed easy and quick infrastructure scalability at a reasonable cost.

The result

Our software engineers worked on various parts of the project:

• Submission portal
• Invoicing
• Rankings
• Experts section
• Administrative sections
• Partners' webpages

During our cooperation, Peerwith also launched a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution - Cockpit, a management console for administrative users at the partner level.

We helped Cockpit in the development of different features:

• monitoring usage of the platform at a partner level;
• access and controlling features related to a partner / institutional account;
• administrative features (budgeting or billing);
• reporting.

While the core work for Peerwith has been already done, ELITEX continues to support the startup, developing new parts of the system and tuning existing ones.

PostCMS is a next-generation content management system, engineered by ELITEX for one of the biggest Italian media corporations – Il Sole 24 Ore. While able to work with any kind of content, it was designed to be very fast and focused on search engines.

The challenge

While there are many content management systems (CMS) on the market, none of them met the needs of our customer perfectly. Working in the newsroom and knowing the daily challenges of journalists and editors, the author of the project’s idea decided to build something completely different.

The customer needed to develop a CMS based on six principles:

1. Speed The product has to work seamlessly on modern devices, allowing editors and contributors to produce content without delays and distractions.

2. Simple UX Light, easy to navigate, showing options only when they are needed, not cluttering the UI/UX unnecessarily.

3. Think SEO first Search engine optimisation is a very important factor for websites. The CMS must present all required information to search engines so that pages can rank higher.

4. An efficient collaboration tool They needed a strong, surefire solution for multiple people working on the same content remotely.

5. Desk functionality For example, the ability to set statuses for the content and advanced permissions.

6. A perfect match for the existing software complex The new system should work well and be easily integrated with existing software – Salsify frontend and ImageX media library.

The solution

From the ELITEX side, an R&D team of senior front-end and back-end JavaScript developers worked on this project, who provided complete technical consultancy to the client. We also provided QA engineers to make sure the app worked as smoothly as possible.

We used:

• Back-end - NodeJS and Sails.js
• Front-end - AngularJS
• Database - MongoDB
• Infrastructure - AWS

As the project required a flexible approach, the team decided to work based on a scrum methodology, having two-week-long sprints. New developments were continuously deploying to the cloud, so the result could be seen immediately.

The result

After months of active work, the prototype was ready. The ELITEX team has engineered a new CMS with a number of advanced features, including:

• Ability to work with any type of content- from articles to bank accounts. We built an architecture that allows adding new types of content right in the admin UI.
• Extended content management and collaboration tools to allow multiple editors to work on the same content effectively.
• Strong integration with schema.org to maximise the proper understanding of the content by search engines.
• Clean and fast UI to focus on the content, not on the UI itself.
• User and role management to control access to the features of the system.
• Own templating system to define how the content is displayed.

The CMS architecture allows it to run on Amazon server, makes the system scalable, fully customised, and flexible to add new features. That’s why, in addition to the direct value that it brings, PostCMS also helps to save budget on the infrastructure and its maintenance.