Case study

A financial research company was developing a new research and data product to provide Wall Street investment research. With ever-growing market complexity and competition, the investment companies needed a better depth and breadth of research to help make accurate decisions in a short time span.

The research professionals had deep experience and extensive industry contacts to launch the product, and had a clear vision of the user experience that they wanted to deliver. The real challenge was to find a partner to build software to help them realize their dream of an attractive website with an efficient workflow

• The research firm wanted to release their analysis only to paying clients, and control against clients sharing their login information with persons who were not paying for access.
• The firm needed to provide a sample of the service to convert potential customers into paying customers without giving away too much for free. Therefore, they had to regulate the amount of trial access to the site.
• With numerous investment opportunities and many factors to consider in an investment, there needed to be a moderation process before research was finalized and made available for the clients.
• Information retrieval for clients had to occur within a very short time span.
• The company needed complex search capabilities at different access levels for customers and employees. Staff privileges had to be calibrated for different employee types.
• The website had to integrate a variety of information produced in-house with other information accessed via external web sites.
• Over time the client wanted to migrate some manual procedures to become executed by software scripts.
• The client wanted an intelligently designed software architecture that could evolve over time and never require a complete overhaul or replacement, no matter how large the business grew.

Obviously, the list is not exhaustive. And these requirements were only the initial challenges that the company faced. In order to achieve all of these requirements, the company decided to look for custom software solution providers to build this highly complex and unique software.

To start with, the technical team at Asahi Technologies created a detailed software requirements specification (SRS) document for the proposed application. An initial design was created including the details of technology to be used for the application development, user accessibility flow charts, and database structure. The design covered even very discrete details of functionalities such as pop-up pages for sample research, user subscription and confirmation, and debugging routines.

Our client was in regular meetings with the technology team at Asahi Technologies, reviewing the functional specifications together at agreed-upon schedules. After several iterations, a final blueprint was developed by Asahi Technologies and approved by the client’s team.

Once the SRS was approved, the blueprint was handed off to the development team, which handled the application development seamlessly. The application essentially was developed on a .Net Framework using SQL Server 2008 as the back-end SQL Database. The code behind language used was C# and the GUI Layer was written in ASP .Net. The entire application was hosted on Microsoft’s IIS Server. The software engineers at Asahi Technologies developed the application with an eye towards ease of use and flexibility for future product expansions.

After the application was completely developed, it went through a complete UIT (User Interface Testing) process by Asahi’s Quality Control team, and UAT (User Acceptance Testing) was then done by the client team.

The application was launched successfully in 2005. Asahi Technologies still maintains the application and provides major enhancements and develops additional modules to suit the client’s requirements as its business evolves.