Link Development

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

My organization is the Islamic Development Bank. We’re an NGO, and I’m the head of IT.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Link Development?

Due to the nature of our current project, our peak season only comprises two months of the whole year. During those two months, 20,000–100,000 people access our website; during the rest of the year, maybe 10 people view it per month. Therefore, our major challenge was to build a flexible hosting system that could expand during the peak season and downsize or downgrade during the off-season.

We have an internal IT team, but we found it most cost-effective to outsource those services.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The website was built on SharePoint, and it has several APIs, web services, and integrations, including SharePoint. The architecture is almost 70% supported on cloud servers.

It also has e-commerce capabilities. When clients buy products, the site has a back end to cover the manufacturing and delivery of products. It also has an integration with affiliates and resellers — resellers who are big names here in Saudi Arabia. The downtime has been zero since the beginning of the project, and it's been almost four years now. The system also contains 2–3 mobile apps and a payment gateway.

Link Development is now responsible for the infrastructure, maintenance, and support of the system. We’re renewing our contract with them.

What is the team composition?

We talk to a project manager every day. The head of their Riyadh branch and their CEO have met with us as well. When we signed the contract, the business analyst and the product owners came on board to gather requirements. After that, we met the UX team, and later on, the technical, development, and infrastructure teams.

How did you come to work with Link Development?

They found us through a bid. We released the RFO in a newspaper and 10 companies responded. After a technical and financial evaluation, we narrowed it down to two teams.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent more than $500,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in January of 2019, and the development lasted almost 18 months. Our contract is still ongoing, and it will end within two months, but we’re going to renew it because we keep updating the system and adding more features.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

This is a very sensitive project, as we can’t afford any downtime during our peak season, and especially because our previous solution failed. This led to our KPIs being downtime and hosting cost.

We used to pay around $600,000 yearly for a combination of our CRM and SharePoint solution. When you build an infrastructure as a server, all servers are running at the same time for the whole year. The delivered system is very flexible and elastic; the cost of hosting on Microsoft Azure has decreased from $600,000 to a maximum of $100,000.

How did Link Development perform from a project management standpoint?

They’re perfect. We have another project now, and my colleagues have already started communicating with them in this regard.

For project management, we started with Jira for the development team and Microsoft Project planner. Then, they moved the development team into Visual Studio, which is also a Microsoft product.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their level of quality, documentation, planning, and communication are perfect.

Are there any areas they could improve?

No, not at the moment.

Any advice for potential customers?

The RFP has to be clear and mention all the requirements because they work according to the requirements.