Sydney, 25th March 2020 Innovo Technology Solutions, a testing and software development consultancy, has today announced its partnership with MuleSoft to provide consulting services for MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform™. Anypoint Platform unlocks the power of API-led connectivity, enabling organizations to connect apps, data and devices more rapidly and efficiently.
MuleSoft provides the leading platform for building application networks. Innovo Technology Solutions’ implementation expertise and industry knowledge, coupled with MuleSoft’s technology, gives clients the support and tools they need to harness the rapidly growing number of apps and data sources. With Anypoint Platform, organizations can unlock new revenue channels, improve customer experiences and drive innovation.
“With the rise of cloud enablement and digital transformations, the need for connected systems across legacy and digital apps is crucial now more than ever. To successfully transform, build and operate a digital environment, Australian enterprises need future-proofed development, testing and integration capabilities,” said Nick Finlayson, Director and Co-Founder, Innovo Technology Solutions.
“By partnering with MuleSoft, the Innovo service team are able to offer integrated software development and testing services, as well as secure data transfer for critical and non-mission critical data that moves in-between legacy and digital applications. Our partnership with MuleSoft increases integration capability between environments and while benefiting the organisation from an operational standpoint.”
With a team of over 50 technology specialists across Australia and overseas, the Innovo team has seen major advances in software development and testing. The team incorporates the latest and most innovative technology in their projects, while implementing devOps methodology and agile practises.
“We were attracted to the MuleSoft value proposition due to their focus on cloud integration and connectivity of SaaS applications. The flexibility of the API-led approach to connectivity in Anypoint Platform enables our customers to address the historical challenges of secure data integration in a quick and simple way. When we apply this to our customer sites, it allows them to focus more on their business and get more out of their technology investments.” comments Finlayson.
“As an organisation, we know that understanding and implementing an efficient software and integration system is not just about the technology. Installing a tool can get you quick wins, but an efficient program is continuously improved and matured to ensure lasting success. We value the MuleSoft technology because it allows us to design and implement future-proofed and flexible software solutions that can scale, and transform, should requirements change.”
“Further to this, we have realised that the problem often involves more than one technology, for example many clients have thousands of applications in their enterprise network, but lack harnessing the full power of these investments because they’re not integrated. With a simple API-centric solution that is overlayed by efficient software and testing, we are able to bring these disparate applications together to improve efficiency.”
“Our customer base in this area is growing and we’re consistently processing and understanding our customers want to use, protect and maximise their technology investments. With the best of breed technology in our solutions, including MuleSoft, we’re confident that we’ll deliver major digital transformation projects on time and on budget.” concludes Finlayson.
“With the explosion of disparate technologies today, connecting them all quickly and efficiently is the key to gaining a competitive edge. Through its partnership with MuleSoft, Innovo Technology Solutions is enabling its customers to create a dynamic application network to achieve their goals and accelerate their pace of business,” said Brent Hayward, senior vice president of global channels and alliances, MuleSoft. “We’re pleased to welcome Innovo Technology Solutions into MuleSoft’s partner ecosystem and look forward to working together to deliver significant business impact to our mutual customers.”
As a MuleSoft Partner, Innovo Technology Solutions helps clients address on-premises, cloud and hybrid integration use cases with scale and ease of use.
ABOUT INNOVO TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS:
Innovo began disrupting the software development and testing industry across Australia and New Zealand in early 2017 with a focus on providing best-of-breed technology delivered by expert Testing, DevOps and Project Management professionals. Innovo’s people bring deep sector-focused knowledge to client projects, to help them mitigate risks, lower total cost of operations and open up revenue streams out of their technology investments. Innovo’s agile methodologies and technology partnerships can connect customers to provide on-demand technology solutions with deep expertise and trusted delivery.
How implementation of open banking can increase your competitive advantage.
If you haven’t heard what open banking is keep reading because now is the time to act. In a world where technology is involving itself in all sectors, the merger of the banking and technology sectors is particularly notable. Traditionally the banking and finance sectors have been required to be ‘tight-lipped’ and meticulously protective of their assets. Now moving into a more -open- world, banks are challenged with the progressively changing requirements. They are now required to ensure they are constantly innovating, implementing new services and technologies for their customers all whilst maintaining compliance. To keep up they must take lead from the tech sector, they must adopt open architectures. Adopting open banking will ensure you not only keep up with your competitors but give you an advantage over those who don’t embrace it.
Embracing APIs
APIs aren’t going anywhere. They are the primary mechanism for building open platforms. Industry veterans, Google, Facebook, Amazon and the likes, along with smaller start-ups are allowing third-party companies to use APIs to access and alter their platforms and code. Giving access to such information and assets to peers may seem contradictory – in some cases this information ends up with competitors – however the results from embracing this way of sharing is significant. You are able to continuously innovate at speed keeping up with the market or moving first. There is the opportunity to consistently develop new products and services, not to mention the openness to sharing knowledge and technology.
Why Now?
Soon – very soon – open banking and APIs will be standard, there are wheels-in-motion to make it so. In 2016 a Payment Services Directive (PDS2) was released in the EU included standards and guidelines for the use of APIs – it mandates banks open their APIs to third-parties. Australia has now followed suit with the Consumer Data Right legislation that was passed this year the aim to improve consumers’ ability to compare and switch between products and services. It will also encourage competition between service providers, leading not only to better prices for customers but also more innovative products and services. This is classified as “Open Banking” legislation in Australia. Under Open Banking, consumers will be able to access and safely transfer their banking data to trusted parties. Open Banking will be introduced in phases, with basic product information to be available from 1 July 2019.
Not only is regulation driving this change a study from IDC note “Six in 10 banks are open to partnering with financial technology firms (fintechs).” Traditionally fintechs were seen as competitors to big banks, however embracing these start-ups as collaborators means they can work together, co-develop and create new ways to innovate and grow, all enabled by APIs.
How can you become open?
In recent years we have seen most big banks become more agile, however generally speaking. Their development processes and architectures can be rigid as they are designed and built for large scale. By appreciating the value of open banking, banks need to leverage old architectures with contemporary approaches. By introducing open technologies and architecture, banks will see an acceleration in the implementation of APIs.
By identifying, training and hiring the right consultants’ banks can work towards attaining major improvements in open technology. These consultants must provide daily updates and adjustments to these new technologies, a vastly different approach to outdated models of the past.
With the right team the next three steps should be taken:
Create Internally used APIs
By using existing software and architecture banks must create APIs that are simple and – most importantly – for internal use at this stage. By approaching from the inside out, the API code is written for the business by the business and minimise scope creep that can come if considering external factors when developing how the APIs will be used to the general public. This way, the API code foundation can be deployed and adopted quickly to ensure speed to market, and later evolved to meet external functionality requirements.
Build a core team across your organisation
The focus here is to build a core team, across all internal business functions that concentrate on open banking. The team should include leaders, developers and programmers. This core team can work collaboratively to identify opportunities that can be acted on to create new technologies. A key area to look at would be micro-services.
External community
With the internal team and APIs in place the bank can now start to engage with the external community. This can be with a pre-existing external community or the bank can build their own external community. By building a new community the bank can engage with external developers who share, build on or create new technology platforms that the bank and its customers have access to.
Banks are now turning to the technology industry to adopt new ways of thinking and improving their banking software. This new way of thinking, with the implementation of the above, can produce new, faster and advanced developments for banks and their customers.
Is your organisation looking towards getting proactive with the new Open Banking standards of Australia?
Here at Enex Consulting we have been instrumental in providing the strategy and thinking around best approach to testing the Open Banking ecosystem, governing it and running the testing regime on a day to day basis, including test automation, in partnership with our clients.
We work with Australia’s leading enterprises to transform their organisations via technology leading strategy, testing and development services. Enex Consulting was formed in 2014 by industry veterans from the enterprise software delivery and testing industry in partnership with a number of specific clients to address the lack of high-quality engagements currently offered in the market. We specialise in large program delivery, testing strategy and capability / maturity assessments, DevOps alignment and organisational digital transformations.
We specialise in delivering our clients program objectives by partnering with them to transform their existing IT landscapes into their future Digital Vision on time and within budget.
To learn more please contact us.
We all know the importance of QA but does your CIO and the team of C-level executives really care?
Understandably the executive and development teams have differing priorities, however, testing should be taken seriously across the whole organisation. By completing well managed testing of your products early, often and consistently, your product will ultimately get to market faster. It also reduces instances of defective software resulting in unsatisfied users. With the right testing strategy in place, you can avoid costly errors, inspire further innovation and get to market sooner meaning higher revenue.
Most importantly, your CIO is more concerned about operational viability, capex reduction and operational efficiency rather than technical granularity of testing and deployment. Below, we have outlined some 5 key arguments related to the concerns of your CIO that will help them understand the importance of testing:
1. Mitigate unsatisfied users
To reduce the risk of customers doing the testing for you, you need to do the right testing and properly before it goes to market. Pro-active and real time monitoring of production logs to have a continuous feedback loop into the regression testing regime can help prevent critical customer experience issues. If not mitigated this can lead to high user dissatisfaction resulting in revenue loss and the potential for any data saved in your software to be breached. The solution? Do risk-based testing for optimum coverage and CX testing to focus on end consumer before it gets to market.
2. Automated Testing to ensure a good ROI
Testing is imperative to ensure the money spent on development is well spent. There is no point having your CIO pour money into developing without actually testing to see if the new product is doing what it’s meant to.
Ensuring your new software delivers as planned to your requirements and using automated testing is the simplest way to ensure the money you have spent developing and engineering this product was, in fact, well spent. Testing in phases will ensure the final product is worth the investment.
3. Invest in consistent and repeatable testing and tooling
The most common phase in testing is in the final stages of development. This is a valid phase to complete testing, however, good developers know testing needs to be done earlier and more frequently. If anything major is uncovered in the final phase, or something as simple as being understaffed for any reason can have a major impact on your release date. Being on time in such a competitive market is imperative.
4. Invest in your testers
Having a team of expert testers is imperative to the efficiency of your testing process and development as a whole. In many cases developers are left with the duties of carrying out the testing. From a CIO perspective this may seem efficient, however, development and testing require two different skill sets.
Whilst employing developers who can also test can be seen as beneficial, asking any employee to move between two job types will always decrease their efficiency and therefore the project efficiency. Developers also, generally speaking, lack the ability to test from the user perspective. We advise cross training your testers to be multi-disciplinary (ie BA tester or SDET) and to have a sufficient knowledge management system to avoid single point dependencies.
5. Expert testers give real-time feedback
Having a dedicated team of testers also ensures you get real-time feedback on your product. Performing testing early on in the development process can ensure adequate feedback from a user perspective on what works, needs fixing or if anything is just not achievable.
Conversely, receiving this feedback in the final stage of development means there could be a fundamental issue that could lead to major redevelopment that could have been rectified earlier in the process if detected. Alternatively, if this feedback is missed altogether and comes back from the customer, this will reduce user satisfaction and any potential redevelopment becomes very costly.
There are numerous benefits to testing consistently and repetitively throughout your development process and it is imperative your C-level executives understand these benefits too. Working together to ensure the software you are creating is delivering as promised is absolutely critical to the success of your product. Testing ensures you have developed the perfect product you set out to produce.
Enex Consulting was formed in 2014 by industry veterans from the enterprise software delivery and testing industry in partnership with a number of specific clients to address the lack of high-quality engagements currently offered in the market. We specialise in large program delivery, testing strategy and capability / maturity assessments, DevOps alignment and organisational digital transformations.
We specialise in delivering our clients program objectives by partnering with them to transform their existing IT landscapes into their future Digital Vision on time and within budget.