Sprue Aegis
Virtualising your technical team
Sprue Safety Products is a subsidiary of Sprue Aegis PLC, now known as FireAngel. Sprue Aegis plc is one of Europe’s leading home safety products suppliers, which designs and sells innovative market-leading smoke and carbon monoxide (‘CO’) alarms and other safety-related products. Can Factory was asked by Sprue Safety to assist them with a due diligence project for a software and hardware platform they were reviewing (SaaS).
The platform included several bespoke modules written at different times using various methodologies and languages. These included Visual Basic, .NET, C, C++, iOS Objective C and Android Java. The platform was recently migrated from a traditional client-server model into the new cloud-based and ever-evolving Amazon Web Services platform.
Can Factory was asked to assist the team with understanding the infrastructure element and reviewing critical areas of the application, communications network, automated testing, deployment and overall robustness of the solution.
The team at Can Factory worked on-site with the client and the platform vendor, as well as at Can Factory offices in London. The work involved several detailed workshop sessions with the vendor. These sessions allowed us to delve into the inner workings of the entire solution, which in turn allowed us to assist the vendor on specific improvement areas that would help them in their development and deployment going forward.
One example of this was the review of some of the Infrastructure As Code applications, such as Chef and Puppet, that are key to managing and maintaining any successful cloud-based migration. People often move to the cloud environment without changing their development, testing and deployment practices. This approach tends to reduce the overall effectiveness of the move and hamper the ability to take advantage of the cloud environment. With this in mind, it is essential to ensure that when a business takes on a solution, it has been put together in the right way to ensure that it can easily be maintained and scaled in the cloud.
The team produced several questions for the client to review and suggestions for specific improvement areas. Working closely with the client and the vendor allowed us to ensure that the two partners can work harmoniously together for many years.
Can Factory provided specialised resources on site and remotely to ensure that the full solution could be looked at in detail before any final decisions were made. Another success story for the London team.
Technologies Used
Languages
- C#
- Java
- Objective-C
- Visual Basic
Platforms & Frameworks
- Android SDK
- Xcode
- Windows Server
- Embedded OS
3rd Party Integration
- Amazon Web Services
- Authentication / billing service
- DRM streaming platform
- Event management