Microsoft Showcases The Technossus Team

The company had a large and sophisticated IT organization which developed and maintained proprietary applications that were critical to the company’s success. The client is one of the world’s largest investment management organizations with $1.4 trillion in assets under management.

The Challenge:

The large investment firm decided to invest in a significant expansion of Microsoft tools and applications to implement within the company. However, this presented a significant challenge to the company’s IT department because they had a number of business application development projects planned which would be complicated by the inclusion of new Microsoft technologies. The IT management team was concerned about the time required to get their staff adequately trained on the new technologies, the potential lost productivity due to the conversion, and whether or not the new tools could adequately meet the needs of the client.

Microsoft assembled key industry experts, IT leaders, and a small number of Microsoft Gold partners, including Technossus, to deliver the training. To deliver a critical component of this conference, Microsoft challenged Technossus to:

• Create a working application with developers from the client to showcase the power of the Microsoft tools
• Administer the portion of the conference devoted to using the Microsoft tech stack to accelerate innovation in IT

The Solutions:

One of the most popular features of the app allowed users to drag and drop the sessions they wanted to attend into the available slots on their personal conference schedule. This automatically registered them for that session.

Technossus developers worked with IT staff from a large investment firm to co-create the app. This process introduced the client’s team to both the Microsoft technology stack and the tools that are used to drive the ALM process management. In addition, it allowed their IT team to experience firsthand how quickly they could develop a new application with the Microsoft tools.

Technossus took a highly practical approach in creating the two sessions on innovation at the conference. In the first session, they showed how 10 Technossus team members built a new product that addressed the exact needs of the users and went to market in just 10 months. They walked the attendees through the development process from idea phase to deployment, demonstrating how the Microsoft tools could be used to quickly generate a proof of concept, get it in the hands of stakeholders, get feedback, iterate the design quickly, and complete the application in a relatively short period of time. Technossus presented the technologies they used to build the app and the Agile process they followed using Microsoft Team Foundation Server. They explained how this process can be used to generate and implement new product ideas.

Technossus did a live demo during the second session on innovation, showing the attendees how they built the registration app that everyone at the conference had used to sign up for the various sessions. They even did live coding in front of hundreds of attendees, which reassured the audience that Microsoft tech was as powerful, flexible, and easy to learn as promised.

The Results:

Both the registration application and the sessions on innovation were highlights of the conference. The hands-on experience gave the large investment firm’s IT team confidence in their ability to rapidly implement the Microsoft tools to meet their application development goals. Technossus was honored that Microsoft trusted them to convert a large enterprise, such as a prominent investment firm, to Microsoft technologies. Moreover, they were delighted that, in a further vote of confidence, Microsoft asked them to help produce a similar one so that the Microsoft team could adopt some of the Technossus training materials and methods.