Treselle Systems

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CEO of Discern, which is a data marketplace that connects business decision makers to the data they need to inform their decisions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Treselle Systems?

We needed a partner that could both take the edge off the volatility of our growth and provide highly skilled resources, which are hard to come by here in Silicon Valley.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Treselle helped build and design an intuitive search engine and embedded interactive analytics capabilities, as well as a swarm of intelligent agents to notify users of significant changes in the data. They worked with structured and unstructured databases and also utilized the Amazon Cloud. Their feedback and discussion surrounding particular tradeoffs have also been valuable.

What is the team dynamic?

There is one primary project manager and a secondary one who steps in when needed.

How did you come to work with Treselle Systems?

When our Vice President of Engineering joined the company about five years ago, he suggested the structure of a small core team in the US and a larger, more flexible partner offshore. After about a three-week vetting process he narrowed the considerations to three candidates, flew to see the Treselle team in Chennai, and concluded that had all the necessary components.

How much have you invested with them?

We are currently investing about $45,000 per month with Treselle, but that number has fluctuated over time.

What is the status of this engagement?

The engagement began in November 2012 and is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Somewhat frequently we experience unexpected surges in business from large customers with quick deadlines and multiple requirements, and Treselle has always been prepared for those instances, which is what enables us to say "yes." They always come through to help meet our deadlines regardless of personal circumstances, and therefore we feel that they have earned our business over and over again.

How did Treselle Systems perform from a project management standpoint?

The project management is very good. Every three months we rotate sending some of our people to Chennai and them sending people here because we think that face-to-face time is very valuable. In the intermediate term, there are usually sprints planned out two or three in advance, for which we provide requirements and they write understanding documents as a check to ensure we are on the same page. On the short term, we have daily phone calls and status updates. For project management tools we use both Jira and Zendesk.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Treselle is very proactive in making suggestions to make the workflow more efficient and effective, which has probably saved multiple months worth of time and money that would have been used re-engineering. That characteristic is what makes them feel more like a partner and less just a vendor.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Not that I can think of, no.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

I would encourage any company going into business with an overseas partner to invest the time to meet face to face. Once we did that and locked in the processes, the partnership really began to flourish.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We’re a financial data company. We purchase data from different sources, process it, and package it to customers’ requirements. The most important part of our business is how we transform it and mix-and-match it. We create daily or more frequent reports, and our customers can access data via our website in any way they want. Our customers are Wall Street companies that use our data to drive their bottom line.

I am a co-founder of the company, as well as the head of QA, the release manager, and the data manager.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Treselle Systems?

We don’t have U.S. programmers, and we needed help with our data processing solution. We had been working with a Chinese firm and had an existing platform in place.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Treselle worked on our data-processing software and website, taking over our Amazon Web Services infrastructure. They handle data scraping and processing, site security, and every other related aspect.

Our company is organized into sectors, with [SMEs] subject-matter experts in each who use proprietary methods to decide what data we will ingest and how we will manipulate it. Based on their input, I write requirements and send them to Treselle’s team, who implement and deploy them on a test platform. Then I perform QA. If the results meet our SMEs’ requirements, the work is promoted to our real, customer-facing platform.

Treselle has had to deal with different types of data and technologies. In the energy sector, we process every oil well in the U.S. It’s all public-domain data being scraped from state websites with tools their team developed and implemented. For real estate, our data comes in various formats—Oracle spreadsheets, CSV or other flat files and MySQL databases.

Treselle also wrote an elaborate NLP [natural language processing] system for drug and device trials in the health care sector. Our SMEs designed meaningful keyword searches, and we applied algorithms to determine how meaningful a text was. That enabled us to extract drug trial data and show secondary variations of the trials to customers.

Once we have the data, we organize and clean it through algorithms they’ve implemented. They use various machine-learning techniques, like linear regression models, predictive models, and clustering tables. All of this had been done in Excel spreadsheets, but it’s now automated using code. As customers send in parameters, we apply algorithms and produce results.

What is the team dynamic?

They’ve had up to 30 engineers working for us and as low as 10, depending on our development status.

We have a lead technical person, Raghavan [Madabusi, VP Engineering]. He has two people directly under him. They manage the project and day-to-day operations. They may be designated as backend and frontend, but I can go to either one and get what I need.

Under them, the team is broken down into different areas, including database, UI/UX, gurus, and in-house QA. There is a lead for each group, with resources under them.

How did you come to work with Treselle Systems?

I don’t know.

How much have you invested with them?

I believe we’re spending around $50,000 per month on their services, but I don’t know if this has been a consistent number.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Treselle in November 2012. We had consulted with them before that time.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Treselle has done some cutting-edge programming over the years, using machine-learning technology typically seen in big data.

As an idea of what we process, our Discern data model for all the data in the system has over 2 billion points in it at the moment. Our daily ingestion is over 1 million points of data.

How did Treselle Systems perform from a project management standpoint?

As a startup, we’ve appreciated their flexibility in changing the team size. They seem to have a lot of developer turnover, so it can take a few days to find the right person, and at times we’ve had to adjust priorities accordingly. This is only an issue for one-off tasks; they’re perfect in terms of everyday routine. In terms of breadth of work, we’ve given Treselle a huge variety of things to do, and they’ve always been able to find someone who could get it done.

I like that I can talk directly to the tech leads, the management, and the actual developers. I am an engineer at heart, so I want to go to the source and get it done. Treselle is OK with this, unlike other companies I’ve used. I’m connected with all of their employees on Skype, and we use JIRA to track problems and requirements. The team submits comments and questions for me via the platform.

We have 2-week development cycles, with a points system assigned to each task. They assign the points at the beginning, based on the requirements we write. We prioritize tasks accordingly, and they start a sprint. We may disagree about the numbers, but not very often. After all these years, we’ve come to understand what it takes. We receive daily updates on their progress for each sprint.

I interface with one of my two main contacts every night. When we get into problems, resolutions, bugs, or requirements, they set up a conference with us and the technical lead for the group we’re working with, in order to eliminate phone-chain problems.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Recently, we needed an entirely new demo on an emergency timeline. They made that happen, despite the fact that there was a cyclone in their part of the world and public transportation was down.

They handle communication well. At no point in our sprints have I been left wondering what they were working on or if they had a problem. That contributes to peace of mind, especially since they’re on the other side of the world. When I have to report on a feature or customer to our CEO, I can give him exact data. If it’s not what we want, I can tell the team and alter priorities to get what we need.

Another strength is that I can give them generic requirements and trust them to tease out the important details. They help me get it right the first time and get to the root of what we want, largely because of their leadership. Both of my contacts have worked in the States before and they know what it takes to build a product.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I have a good working relationship with them, but I do remember one low point. I had spent a lot of time mentoring one of their new QA team members on our process. She became very thorough and one of the best QA people I’ve ever worked with. After 6 months, she relocated and had to leave the company. There was nothing Treselle could do, but it was very unfortunate to lose that time I invested.