Download PDF
South African Fintech Overcomes Infrastructure Challenges with Microsoft Solutions
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Private Cloud
Applicable Industries
- Cement
- Construction & Infrastructure
Use Cases
- Construction Management
- Infrastructure Inspection
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
The Challenge
Allegiance Consulting, a South African fintech company specializing in complex financial planning systems, faced significant challenges when the COVID-19 health crisis struck. The company had to quickly adapt to a remote working environment and reassure its clients about the future. The main challenges included developing applications quickly on a secure and scalable infrastructure and staying connected with colleagues and clients. The company had to develop an engagement application for one of its large clients using Microsoft's Blazor technology. This application was a diagnostic tool providing guidance on dealing with the health crisis financially while staying safe. The company also had to ensure that its entire staff of 37 people could connect internally over a secure platform and collaborate with clients.
About The Customer
Allegiance Consulting (Pty) Ltd is a South African fintech company that specializes in complex financial planning systems. The company started as a team of legal and business consultants in 1999 and has since expanded to include talented developers, quants, and UX specialists. The company serves five of the largest banks and life companies in South Africa and has a staff of 37 people. Allegiance Consulting has been using a private cloud for more than 10 years and moved to Azure local infrastructure in 2019. The company is also planning to automate its infrastructure layer hosted on Azure.
The Solution
Allegiance Consulting turned to Microsoft solutions to overcome these challenges. The company developed an engagement application using Microsoft's Blazor technology and deployed it on Microsoft Azure, which provided the necessary scalability and security for an enterprise-level application in the financial services sector. The company also moved from a private cloud to Azure, which gave them access to enterprise-level cloud solutions and allowed them to scale applications up or down at any given point in time. To stay connected with colleagues and clients, the company used Microsoft Teams as their main platform for communication. The company is also planning to automate its infrastructure layer hosted on Azure to spin up new environments without human interaction and deploy on a continuous basis using Azure DevOps as their base pipeline layer.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
System 800xA at Indian Cement Plants
Chettinad Cement recognized that further efficiencies could be achieved in its cement manufacturing process. It looked to investing in comprehensive operational and control technologies to manage and derive productivity and energy efficiency gains from the assets on Line 2, their second plant in India.
Case Study
IoT System for Tunnel Construction
The Zenitaka Corporation ('Zenitaka') has two major business areas: its architectural business focuses on structures such as government buildings, office buildings, and commercial facilities, while its civil engineering business is targeted at structures such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Within these areas, there presented two issues that have always persisted in regard to the construction of mountain tunnels. These issues are 'improving safety" and "reducing energy consumption". Mountain tunnels construction requires a massive amount of electricity. This is because there are many kinds of electrical equipment being used day and night, including construction machinery, construction lighting, and ventilating fan. Despite this, the amount of power consumption is generally not tightly managed. In many cases, the exact amount of power consumption is only ascertained when the bill from the power company becomes available. Sometimes, corporations install demand-monitoring equipment to help curb the maximum power demanded. However, even in these cases, the devices only allow the total volume of power consumption to be ascertained, or they may issue warnings to prevent the contracted volume of power from being exceeded. In order to tackle the issue of reducing power consumption, it was first necessary to obtain an accurate breakdown of how much power was being used in each particular area. In other words, we needed to be able to visualize the amount of power being consumed. Safety, was also not being managed very rigorously. Even now, tunnel construction sites often use a 'name label' system for managing entry into the work site. Specifically, red labels with white reverse sides that bear the workers' names on both sides are displayed at the tunnel work site entrance. The workers themselves then flip the name label to the appropriate side when entering or exiting from the work site to indicate whether or not they are working inside the tunnel at any given time. If a worker forgets to flip his or her name label when entering or exiting from the tunnel, management cannot be performed effectively. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, Zenitaka decided to build a system that could improve the safety of tunnel construction as well as reduce the amount of power consumed. In other words, this new system would facilitate a clear picture of which workers were working in each location at the mountain tunnel construction site, as well as which processes were being carried out at those respective locations at any given time. The system would maintain the safety of all workers while also carefully controlling the electrical equipment to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Having decided on the concept, our next concern was whether there existed any kind of robust hardware that would not break down at the construction work site, that could move freely in response to changes in the working environment, and that could accurately detect workers and vehicles using radio frequency identification (RFID). Given that this system would involve many components that were new to Zenitaka, we decided to enlist the cooperation of E.I.Sol Co., Ltd. ('E.I.Sol') as our joint development partner, as they had provided us with a highly practical proposal.
Case Study
Splunk Partnership Ties Together Big Data & IoT Services
Splunk was faced with the need to meet emerging customer demands for interfacing IoT projects to its suite of services. The company required an IoT partner that would be able to easily and quickly integrate with its Splunk Enterprise platform, rather than allocating development resources and time to building out an IoT interface and application platform.
Case Study
Bridge monitoring in Hamburg Port
Kattwyk Bridge is used for both rail and road transport, and it has played an important role in the Port of Hamburg since 1973. However, the increasing pressure from traffic requires a monitoring solution. The goal of the project is to assess in real-time the bridge's status and dynamic responses to traffic and lift processes.
Case Study
Bellas Landscaping
Leading landscaping firm serving central Illinois streamlines operations with Samsara’s real-time fleet tracking solution: • 30+ vehicle fleet includes International Terrastar dump trucks and flatbeds, medium- and light-duty pickups from Ford and Chevrolet. Winter fleet includes of snow plows and salters.