360° Software Product Engineering Services Company
Established in 2007, AFour Technologies (a.k.a. AFour) focuses on Software Product Engineering Services comprising of UI/UX Design, Architecture Design and Consulting, Software Development, DevOps (CloudOps, SysOps and DBOps), QA (Test Strategy and Implementation, Test Automation, Performance, Security), Monitoring and Technical Support. With an excellent track record of over 10 years and a focus on software product engineering, AFour is a true example of self-belief, consistency, and transparency. AFour is an ideation and technology house. Product companies associate with AFour for its product conceptualisation and technology skills in a wide range of technologies like Java, Python, .NET, Javascript (MEAN), LAMP (Perl and PHP), Angular, React, C++. The company is a hub of every cutting-edge technology in software engineering ─ Hyper-convergence, SDN, Virtualisation, Next Generation Data Center Technologies, Networking, Enterprise Mobility. Till date, AFour Technologies has been able to bring together some of the best and brightest minds in software engineering.
headquarters
other locations
-
501-502, 5th Floor, Kapil Zenith IT Park, Near Chandani Chowk, BavdhanPune, MH 411021India
Focus
Portfolio
Healthcare Information Exchange
Brief about the Client and their Product
The client is a healthcare solution provider in the USA.
Their product aims at solving the below-mentioned challenges:
– In 2004, the US govt took initiatives to address concerns related to maintenance of medical health records, considering aspects like cost and accuracy.
– Many tests were repeated by the patients which incurred additional costs to them as well as to the insurance companies, and manual entries of these records led to human errors.
– It was concluded that introducing completely electronic healthcare systems connected across the nations could address these concerns.
– In 2004, the US government formed The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). ONC came up with an initiative of National Health Information Network (NHIN). NHIN was formed through the collaboration of Regional Health Information Organizations (RHIO).
– RHIO worked by implementing Health Information Exchanges (HIEs). HIEs were IT-based systems which collaborated information across different EHR entities such as OPDs, Rehabilitation Systems, Clinical Laboratories and Public Health Records etc.
For exchanging messages, Health Level 7 (HL7) format was created; these systems also incorporated standards from HIPAA as well as IHE profiles.
Brief about the Kind of Engagement
AFour worked with this customer for 3+ years.
At the inception of the project, the challenges the customer was facing were:
– The product was in the alpha stage of release; initial pilots were going on where they were trying to implement the HIE.
– Challenges faced were: Low testing coverage and anomalies in the nature of Ad hoc testing which were arising with defects in the later stage, hence delaying the release.
– Other problems were API layer not being tested well, hence it was required to change at the end which was causing defects and delay in the overall release.
This project was bagged due to our vast Microsoft Technology experience.
The project started with automating one of their compatibility tests w.r.t the different versions of the HL7 standard.
Initially, the focus was to implement test automation on some of their test cases.
Automation of HL7 related test cases were done in the system, followed by functional testing, test cycle management and performance, security, reliability and scalability (PSRS) testing of the product.
Cloud Native Workload Protection
The client’s product deals with the “Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery” domain.
The product facilitates the enterprises to back up their entire cloud and perform point-in-time restores in case of any disaster or failure.
It can be integrated with OpenStack or Red Hat Virtualization and has the capability to backup and restore entire workloads on-demand.
Tenants can restore individual items, VMs, full workloads, or entire cloud environments via the OpenStack Horizon or the User Interface of Red Hat Virtualization.
One of the prominent features of this solution is the migration of complete workloads from one cloud to another, which is a critical feature for enterprise-level customers.
Hyperlocal Shopping Search Portal
Brief about the Client and Product
The client is a startup based out of the United States, headquartered in California.
The client’s product is an e-commerce portal that aggregates the products store by store across various categories and helps to find merchandise of different brands from top local retail stores.
The portal enables the user to search for specific merchandise on sale, geographically pinpointing the nearest store location carrying those items.
This makes local shopping easy. So, one can print their shopping list and plan before their shopping trip instead of having to search from store to store to find sales.
Kind of Engagement
AFour started the engagement with the client in 2015 for the product engineering services.
The client approached us for improving the data processing engine, which had very low performance and at the same time revamping the user experience.
When we started the engagement, the data processing engine took more than 20 hours for processing millions of products into the portal and was developed in Java.
The user experience was built using the Magento platform, which was very bulky and based in PHP language.
Because of the technology choices, there were several shortcomings in providing delightful user experience and adoption of the product.
Key Highlights and Achievements
We rearchitected the data processing engine using Hadoop Distributed Processing and improved the performance by over 200%.
Moreover, the data processing engine was completely cloud-native and costed 1/5th of the original solution.
The User experience was revamped and built using React.js to enable Instant Search Experience with response time < 500 ms. This greatly enhanced the product search for the users.
Developed entirely new faceted search experience using Elastic Search.
Additionally, AFour team also owned the product validation and managed the staging, Production infrastructure in AWS.
Thus, owning the end to end development, testing, and delivery of the product.
Healthcare – Case Management
Brief about the Client and Product
The client’s product is a comprehensive solution that accelerates the operational needs of healthcare workflows.
The workflows include management services, consulting services, claims management, mental and behavioural health, and electronic data exchange (ePHI- which is a part of HIPAA compliance).
Kind of Engagement
AFour’s engagement with the client started around early 2019 as a part of application modernization.
Here we successfully re-engineered the two-decades-old system with a new technology stack.
As a part of this, we have successfully delivered release 1 with case management services as well as consulting providers’ services search.
Key Highlights and Achievements
The major challenge was to move from desktop application to web application where the application must comply with HIPAA standards w.r.t to data, privacy, and security.
We have successfully integrated with Bing Maps for showing the exact location of Consulting service providers.
Healthcare Automation Solution
Brief about the Client and Product
Client is a NASDAQ listed company and a global technology leader in robotic assisted and minimally invasive surgery.
They develop, manufacture and market surgical systems.
The company strives to make surgery easier and effective for surgeons, patients and their families.
Our client is a proven leader in surgical robotics; they have achieved this by increasing the adoption of minimal surgery.
Client has a number of applications and portals with large test cases and short release cycles.
AFour helps them in automating the test cases which in turn helps them in release testing.
Brief about the Kind of Engagement
The project was kicked off in 2016.
The initial engagement was to automate test cases for one of their applications.
Till date, we have automated 250+ test cases which are still in use for every new release of the product.
There are three releases every year, and every time we execute the entire automation suite.
At present, we are involved in web, mobile and SAP test automation of multiple products.
We are also involved in release testing and production deployment support.
Key Highlights and Achievements
We have achieved maximum ROI by automating manual processes.
With automation, we successfully reduced the release cycle from 3months to 3 weeks.
We have helped our client in achieving optimal test coverage of their products with test automation. Also, with the optimization of the processes resulted in streamlined release testing.
We tailored our test framework according to the client’s needs to support multi-lingual, multi-platform automation for web and mobile.
Healthcare Aggregator Solution
Brief about the Client and their Product
Client’s organization was formed by a group of ex-Microsoft employees, who all came up with an idea to form this startup.
The idea was to solve a major challenge of the US healthcare sector; i.e. making patients and doctors aware about the alternative cost-effective medicines.
The idea was to build a product which would help patients to choose pharmacies of their choice.
Brief about the Kind of Engagement
The project started in July 2018.
Initial team was formed comprising of three developers to develop microservices using the .NET Core.
In October 2018 UX engagements were started; later, the UI development was initiated to develop a responsive web application with the feel of a mobile application
Key Highlights/Achievements (Technical/Non-Technical)
Phase 1 completed which consisted of a few key features.
At the same time, it is successfully rolled out into production for their customers.
The client is happy with the on-going work.
Fog Computing Platform
Brief about the Client and Product
Today, there’s a large-scale growth and rapid evolution of requirements in Industrial IoT.
For this, there was a dire need of a cloud-inspired infrastructure that is closer to the end devices with real-time, scalable, safe, and secure capabilities.
And so, the concept of Fog Computing has evolved into what it is today.
Our client is the pioneer of Fog Computing. IT is a platform that inserts distributed resources at the edge with Cloud-like management and real-time capabilities.
It bridges the gap between end devices and the Cloud infrastructure.
The platform brings real-time aware virtualization, distributed analytics, centralized fleet management, secure application hosting, multi-tenancy, and role-based access control.
It is done with a single point of data aggregation from the production floor to cloud applications.
Kind of Engagement
AFour’s engagement with the client started around 3 yrs back with the POC, where the requirement was the development of test tools in python that would auto-generate test cases for their swagger based rest APIs.
Later we developed CLI based SDK to manage the customer assets and provide easy development of their applications.
Then we proceeded further with provisioning & deployment of the customer applications on the edge devices to achieve communications and real time data analysis with the robots and other IoT enabled devices.
We also worked on the development of various APIs for app hosting, RBAC, Data streams and many more.
As Afour is known for its 360-degree services, this engagement is not only just limited to the Backend Development.
We have worked on UI/UX Design & Development, Manual and Automation testing, Build and Release Management and DevOps.
We provided complete test coverage for this edge computing platform by performing functional, regression, performance, security, longevity, acceptance testing and many more.
We have developed robust API and UX Automation frameworks and automated thousands of test cases and integrated into CI/CD for daily sanity runs.
Moreover, a Web Application for this platform was also built.
With our Build and Release management process, we created and deployed software releases on AWS/Azure and on-prem servers.
Key Highlights and Achievements
One of the biggest milestones that we have achieved is by migrating the UI from AngularJS to Angular 7 that offers substantial benefits like improved user interface, higher security, seamless maintenance and an overall improvement in the application performance.
Then comes the development of Alarm and Monitoring Daemon, Cluster Management for High Availability, libraries to manage long-running tasks, internalization & localization and so on.
And for sure, we celebrate our achievements and the success of release with wonderful team outings
Reviews
the project
Dev & Testing Staff Augmentation for Data Consulting Company
“The cost-saving has been a plus, and the quality of their people is pretty good.”
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I work for IHS Markit. We have a business line called RootMetrics, which focuses on mobile analytics or mobile performance benchmarking. We measure carrier performance with our proprietary scientific collection of data, as well as with cloud data. I’m the director of the engineering team.
What challenge were you trying to address with AFour Technologies?
Finding top talent was a challenge. It doesn’t mean that there’s none out there, but, compared to big tech companies, it was a challenge for us. We’ve primarily gone to them for QA testing, as well as for DevOps and web development. We rely on AFour Technologies to provide high-quality engineers when a new project comes up and we need to go to market as soon as possible so that we can spend less time training them and explaining the technology.
What was the scope of their involvement?
We required resources that were proficient in open-source technology and AWS. We have initial interviews with the team members. AFour has a team in India, but they have an office in Seattle, so we can reach out to them easily. They also have reasonable pricing, and that was an important factor. One of the advantages we have with AFour is that we can always find good people to work with us and deliver products faster.
What is the team composition?
We’re working with around six people from their team right now.
How did you come to work with AFour Technologies?
My manager at the time looked at a couple of companies and found AFour. I interviewed them when I took over management in 2016.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working with AFour in May 2015, and our engagement is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
The cost-saving has been a plus, and the quality of their people is pretty good. When we needed a web developer or another resource in a short period of time, they were able to find someone in their team.
How did AFour Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?
There are a couple of people from my team who attend daily calls with AFour, and there are people on their side who ensure that the team is working correctly. Everything is getting done on time, and we can work everything out with the team lead over there. AFour has additional resources for the remote team, who can jump on quickly if we need to ramp up.
What did you find most impressive about them?
They always have a couple of people shadowing the team. Someone left their company a couple of years ago, and they were able to quickly add someone else. That was done quickly, rather than getting someone completely new and requiring a knowledge transfer.
Their representative in the US calls me regularly to discuss the work and find out if there are any issues with the team. The relationship has been good. They’re always looking to make improvements and always asking us for feedback.
Right now, we’re developing an SDK for iOS and Android, and we wanted to make sure that we were doing testing on the latest devices. India is really locked down right now, more so than the US. People can’t go out, but they somehow still managed to get the latest devices to ensure that everything was working. This is a great example of what makes them stand out.
Are there any areas they could improve?
No, I haven’t really come across anything. There were some initial challenges, but it’s been going smooth for at least the last three years.
Their rates are really reasonable. We’re mostly going with the 2015 rate. AFour is always trying to work with us and to help us as much as they can.
Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?
It’s important for clients to find the best manager possible. AFour has a pretty solid background for support. We started out with testing and expanded to security, AWS, and DevOps.They have reasonable rates, but that doesn’t mean that they deliver cheap quality.
the project
Automated Security Testing for Cloud Data Company
"Every member of the AFour Technologies team is very independent."
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the CTO of Stellus Technologies, a cloud data company.
What challenge were you trying to address with AFour Technologies?
Our testing environment required an additional set of resources. We also needed the hardware investment that we made to be used 24/7.
What was the scope of their involvement?
We started off with a very specific goal: we needed AFour Technologies to do a security sweep of the product that we were building to ensure that there were no known security exploits that can be taken. They brought in one person who had very good experience, and we were very impressed with them.
We then decided to expand AFour Technologies’ work. They came back with a proposal to run additional tests overnight for the local team in the U.S. That’s how we got the bigger bang for the buck. There were a few people involved in that particular project.
The second part was that running tests manually was extremely painful and slow. We wanted to develop some automation scripts so we could automate a lot of the QA tests and run them 24/7. We added a few more people to do that.
What is the team composition?
We started off with one person who is still our project lead. The CEO is based out of the U.S. and we talk to him quite a bit. We have anywhere from 10-12 people on the team supporting us.
How did you come to work with AFour Technologies?
Very few people have the security background to do what we need to do. We started with that and it gave us the opportunity to evaluate some of the other people as they were doing things. What really impressed us was their quality of work. The security work was very well done. It was on budget and on time. It gave us a lot of confidence that they were very professional and efficient in what they do. We interviewed a bunch of those people, and our suspicion turned out to be correct.
How much have you invested with them?
We spend about $300,000 per year.
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working together in November 2017 and the work is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
The quality of work AFour Technologies produces is really good. We have a joint statement of work and specifically expect a certain number of people doing a certain amount of testing. Most metrics are around how many tests they’re running and how many automation scripts they’ve developed for us. They’ve met our goals and expectations so far and even give us recommendations on how to fix any issues.
How did AFour Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?
Every member of the AFour Technologies team is very independent. When they’re working during the day time there, it’s the middle of the night here. We give specific instructions at the end of the day and they’re being very efficient, professional, productive, and responsive.
We have regular meetings maybe once a quarter. The people who work for me meet them every week. They provide an update and discuss what needs to be done for the next week. They’re integrated into our scrum sprints. They’re very good at managing the project and being very communicative. We use Confluence and Jira.
What did you find most impressive about them?
We’re very happy with them.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I found them lacking in C++ coding. Their focus is around DevOps, Cloud automation, and web development. It’s worked okay for us. We would have used other services had they had them.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Be sure you have a really good project lead on their side. That’s what made it successful for us.
the project
Dev Staff Augmentation for Cloud Data Solution
"We’ve been able to rely on them for our product development."
the reviewer
the review
A Clutch analyst personally interviewed this client over the phone. Below is an edited transcript.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the founder and CTO of Trilio Data Inc.
What challenge were you trying to address with AFour Technologies?
We needed readily available talent to jumpstart our product development.
What was the scope of their involvement?
They mostly work with cloud-related technologies like OpenStack and Red Hat Virtualization. Their team does all the DevOps processes that go with the development such as defining the CDC pipeline, end-to-end testing, and testing automation.
What is the team composition?
There are 25 people working with us. The team is comprised of developers, QA testers, a system administrator, and customer support staff. We still have the same resources for the last four years.
How did you come to work with AFour Technologies?
We interviewed a few companies. We were looking for DevOps skillset and AFour Technologies met this need. They also had good experience working with related companies.
How much have you invested with them?
We spent $1 million per year (about $5 million total).
What is the status of this engagement?
We started working together in October 2014 and the work is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
When we hired the first person, we knew that we made the right choice. They do a good job finding the resources with the right technical skillset. We have customers all around the world, so sometimes we need to jump into a customer call to troubleshoot some issues. The team is very accommodating in taking calls. Their dedication is top-notch and they’ve never failed us.
How did AFour Technologies perform from a project management standpoint?
We use Slack, Hangouts, email, and Zoom Conference calls on a daily basis. Since they’re remote, communication is the most important thing. We have standup calls every morning our time and evenings their time. It works very well and we have good communication. The team always knows the context of the requests coming in and there’s not much confusion. They deliver good results.
The team owns the product from the start. From gathering the requirements to planning development cycles and delivering the product, they take ownership. This is motivating for the team to work hard.
What did you find most impressive about them?
I’m very happy with the results, as is the company at large. We’re in a challenging domain and the standard of technical aptitude needed is relatively high compared to other areas. We’ve been able to rely on them for our product development.
Are there any areas they could improve?
I have no complaints.
Do you have any advice for potential customers?
Communicate and give them ownership of the product. They will deliver. I would recommend anyone to partner with them.
AFour Technologies’ work has been met with positive acclaim. The team delivers high quality at a reasonable price point. Customers can expect a responsive vendor that goes the extra mile.