"We began our partnership with Symphony facing the challenge of modernizing our 15-year-old legacy product. Right from the start, we aimed to develop a cloud-native product using modern approaches. Our vision was to create an incredibly scalable and secure product. Symphony's greatest value early on was helping us architect a modern system in practice, utilizing their previous experience to guide us and avoid potential pitfalls. In addition to building a new product, we were also overhauling our software development processes. We wanted to transition to an agile environment, implement full automation, and adopt a microservices approach alongside event handling. Besides the engineering efforts, Symphony provided guidance and helped establish the structure we still follow today.

The incorporation of ML models became integral to our product offering. Our goal was to deliver a smart system that provides users with the information they need when they need it. Symphony built the foundational models and successfully onboarded our in-house team towards the end of our engagement. We were on a tight deadline, and Symphony played a key role in enabling us to launch our product on time. We already migrated several customers and initiated the sales cycle. Symphony proved to be a reliable partner who not only helped bring our new product to market but also navigated reprioritizations in deliverables. They were willing to collaborate with us, understand our challenges, and find the best solutions that worked for the product and financial-wise for us as a company."

The client is a PE-backed provider of digital workplace solutions, empowering over 7K organizations across diverse industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance, and education, to enhance communication, collaboration, and culture. Facing an intranet industry crowded with over 50 alternatives, and a 15-year-old legacy product of their own, the client recognized the imperative to adopt a unique strategy to preserve their competitive edge. Approaching the end of the investment lifecycle, the client needed to demonstrate their capability in efficiently onboarding customers onto their new platform. Despite heavily leveraging tech vendors, there was a lack of technical leadership resulting in the possibility of missing a launch deadline which was prioritized by the board. Understanding the necessity to face this challenge, the client reached out to Symphony to modernize their digital workplace. 

The board's deadlines, slow delivery, unplanned story inclusions, and task overload delayed progress and development velocity. At the same time, the transition to microservices architecture required adjustments, and the client lacked QA processes, resulting in frequent feature redoing and compromised product quality, prompting the client to seek a partner to align with timelines and deliverables.

During a 2-week Assessment phase, the Symphony team identified the key tech drivers for modernization and tech modernization strategies. Collaborating with the client's in-house team, we were tasked to act as an accelerator in the journey, generating value and expediting the roadmap while minimizing disruption to the existing team's delivery pace.

Notifications was the first identified feature our team developed, followed by taking ownership of a larger portion of the roadmap. We built custom solutions for Bulk User Import and Recommendation Engine, which was developed through a matrix factorization method and preceded by a build vs. buy analysis to ensure the most effective approach. Symphony embraced a microservices architecture and improved the client’s market positioning by introducing an ML-powered intranet solution. By centralizing communication and refining content navigation, we improved user engagement and used real-time updates to improve collaboration. The ML-powered personalized content discovery facilitated knowledge-sharing and scalable user management features were implemented, optimizing operational efficiency and supporting organizational growth. 

Our team ensured seamless integration of these enhancements without compromising delivery timelines, developed comprehensive documentation, and organized multiple recorded sessions, guiding the in-house team through the handover process. Following this, we consistently updated the handover documentation and chose the best development path based on the in-house team's skill set. In the end, Symphony transitioned from the initial accelerator role to a transformational partner one, scaling up to 14 team members. 

Symphony modernized a 15-year-old legacy digital product for a private equity-backed leader in employee engagement and productivity, resulting in a scalable and secure solution

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Tech, Media and Telecom

Tech modernization

Digital workplace solution for a leader in employee engagement and productivity

AWS services

Mach49 is a corporate innovation consultancy partnering with global businesses to build their growth engines through venture building, investing, strategic partnering, and targeted mergers and acquisitions.

The client approached Symphony to digitize the existing processes in order to unlock long-term value and speed up processes. They needed a highly-scalable, reliable, and secure solution to digitize their current processes that proved inefficient.

Symphony developed a multi-environment, containerized architecture on AWS, leveraging Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) for orchestration and management. 

The workflow begins with GitHub Actions triggering CI/CD pipelines upon code commits. Containerized code is then stored in AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR), with ArgoCD managing deployments to Kubernetes.

Our AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) architecture, complete with public and private subnets, ensures a secure and efficient network. User traffic is managed by a Public Application Load Balancer (ALB), while Kubernetes pods handle application operations, supported by services like ING and EP for external and internal communications.

We integrated AWS managed services such as Elastic Search, Redis, and S3 bucket for search, in-memory storage, and durable object storage. System performance and analytics are monitored through Grafana dashboards. For database management, we utilized MongoDB for NoSQL needs and RDS Postgres for transactional data, ensuring both flexibility and reliability.

The DevOps process involved continuous integration, continuous deployment, quality gates, and deployment agility. This ensured a streamlined delivery of features and updates, while maintaining high quality standards and minimizing risks.

Our team has also integrated ChatGPT into the platform and extended the LLM model with LongChain framework, enriching the learning process and platform engagement in accordance with client regulations and guidelines. 

Digitized the incubation process with a simplified and scalable infrastructure for Mach49

Venture Capital

 An enterprise platform for venture incubation management

Karate Combat is a professional live-action martial arts league streamed in over 100 countries worldwide. After getting a $20M sponsorship from an EVM-compatible blockchain, they approached Symphony to help them build a blockchain platform with a one-of-a-kind concept.

The client aimed to unlock a new user segment and elevate the viewing experience by giving fans a stake in the game. Their main incentive for better fan engagement was creating a platform with a frictionless, no-loss play-to-earn game with token giveaways.

In addition, their goal was to leverage blockchain technology and use Hedera and Ethereum networks to facilitate the gaming experience and tokenomics.

Symphony team delivered an advanced AWS-centric solution to streamline and secure online interactions. The system's focal point is Amazon Route 53, ensuring precise user request routing via a sophisticated DNS management system. This seamless flow is further enhanced by AWS CloudFront, a global content delivery network that drastically reduces latency and fortifies security during web application engagement.

The foundation of data storage and management is laid by Amazon S3 buckets. These buckets not only provide secure storage for application content but also adeptly handle operational data for 'FlightOps', showcasing the adaptability and scalability inherent in AWS's object storage services.

Structured within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), our design allocates resources across both public and private subnets. Application Load Balancers (ALB) manage traffic across multiple targets in the public subnets, ensuring consistent high availability and fault tolerance. Network Address Translation (NAT) gateways safeguard internet traffic to the private subnet's EKS nodes, maintaining secure, indirect external connectivity.

Central to this architecture are the Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) nodes, which anchor the containerized application deployment. They leverage Kubernetes's robustness without the overhead of managing its orchestration.

Operational efficiency is achieved with AWS CloudWatch Logs, rigorously monitoring system activity to maintain peak performance and security standards. AWS Lambda functions are used throughout the system, offering responsive serverless computing that adapts swiftly to events.

Data integrity and speed are handled by Amazon DynamoDB tables, functioning as a powerful, low-latency NoSQL database. AWS EventBridge acts as the system's nerve center, linking applications with event-driven processes. The architecture's resilience and scalability are further enhanced by AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS), which facilitates service decoupling by queuing messages.

Designed and built an AWS-based blockchain platform with novel governance utility token mechanism for Karate Combat

Consumer and Retail

A blockchain platform for a martial arts sports league

50+ 

"Over the past ten years, DECKED has experienced rapid growth, leaving us with significant technical debt and a lack of in-house software expertise. Partnering with Symphony, we explored various options to identify the highest ROI opportunity. We prioritized workflow automation and order flow systems to reduce the manual touches required to sustain our business growth. When we looked at the ROI and associated implementation costs, it became evident an automated solution for our B2B ordering workflow offered the highest ROI and proved the most scalable.
As a physical product company, maintaining a deep bench of software experts isn’t practical, and the flexibility to scale up or down with Symphony to ensure we always have the correct set of skills has proven invaluable. Their nuanced understanding of our business challenges, from e-commerce and commercial sales to manufacturing, has helped us identify opportunities, prioritize projects, and allocate dollars to technology investments for the next few years."

The client, a leading in-vehicle storage manufacturer backed by private equity, faced challenges with its manual B2B ordering process that hindered growth and increased operational costs. With a focus on custom-made storage systems for pick-up trucks and cargo vans, the company had grown to a multimillion-dollar business but struggled with bottlenecks in its ordering workflow. Understanding the necessity to face this challenge, the client reached out to Symphony to transform their order process management by transitioning from manual processing to an automated solution, streamlining every aspect of the B2B customer workflow.

The manual B2B ordering process involved 50+ human touches. The client needed a solution to optimize its order management process, reduce operational costs, and enhance organizational efficiency.

Symphony undertook a comprehensive approach to address the client’s pain points. We began by consolidating the ERPs under one system, laying the groundwork for a more streamlined workflow. Conducting discovery workshops with key stakeholders, including customer service, warehouse, finance, and sales, we gathered insights into the end-to-end order management workflow. Symphony presented the client with two options: a fully customized solution and a hybrid solution with off-the-shelf incorporations. Through a detailed analysis of B2B Portal and Order Management Platform product builds, we supported the client in conducting an ROI analysis, ultimately proceeding with the custom solution. 

The core of our engagement involved product delivery and continuous refinement, supporting the client, a non-digital company, in its transformative journey. 

Symphony digitalized an order management process for a private equity-backed in-vehicle storage manufacturer, streamlining every aspect of the B2B customer workflow

Industrial

$900K

We create a culture of partnership

Digitizing manual processes

Order management process and workflow optimization for an in-vehicle storage manufacturer 

30% 

60% 

reduction in the cloud infrastructure costs

The client is one of the heavy industry leaders in North America with multi-billion revenue and a workforce exceeding thousands, distributed across three continents and over 30 hubs that needed to diversify their offer and start a digital transformation. They approached Symphony, looking for a software design and development partner to test the assumptions about the viability of a new, fully digital product. Digitalization benefits are apparent, though it remains difficult for companies to decide which digital technologies are most relevant to their needs. Symphony translated the high-level concepts and client’s business goals into a transformation strategy that led to a web-based and desktop application used to automate and optimize workflows and reporting based on the company's needs and government legislation. Since then, Symphony has been the client’s #1 preferred tech vendor for digital transformation journey. 

Our main objective was to diversify the client’s offer and kick off digital transformation to maintain their leading position in the world’s largest market.



Symphony developed an end-to-end solution to automate and modernize legacy workflows and reporting in line with the company's needs and government legislation. Once both the business and technical viability were proven, Symphony refactored the application from a monolithic architecture to microservices. This allowed seamless integration with minimal disruption of new feature development and integrated existing domain-specific solutions into the system, allowing future scaling and improvements. We integrated solutions based on existing legacy desktop applications, making them available as part of a new cloud-based digital platform. Our team developed an integration interface, allowing users to easily migrate the data they have on their legacy applications into the system. Symphony also consolidated multiple individual applications into a single digital platform, allowing users to streamline their workflows, keeping all of their data, tooling, and reporting in one place.

Symphony transformed a global heavy industry giant through legacy modernization, diversifying its offer and kicking off digital transformation to maintain its leading position

over 156%

Legacy modernization for a US heavy industry leader

20,000

The client, a pharmaceutical marketplace, provides over-the-counter drugs, beauty, and personal care products online to almost 9M active customers. However, the company’s monolith platform was showing its age and beginning to hinder development and limit scalability, so they decided to build a new services-based architecture. At the same time, the client decided to diversify their sales portfolio and introduce a new commission-based revenue model by launching a new marketplace that would enable third-party sellers to offer their products. 


Our main objective was to transform the client webshop into a B2C, multi-vendor marketplace while also developing a separate business logic with new processing, shipping, and payment rules.

Symphony collaborated with the client's in-house teams, enhancing the webshop and marketplace on a unified codebase. While maintaining consistency in the code, a separate business logic was developed for the marketplace, addressing unique scenarios like multi-vendor orders and simultaneous purchases from the webshop and marketplace. We facilitated the inclusion of third-party sellers and offers within the shop environment, ensuring a cohesive shopping experience. We also addressed critical post-sales processes, encompassing return and refund workflows, commission calculations, and facilitating communication between customers and sellers for inquiries or complaints. Additionally, our team integrated a platform to support the marketplace in sharing products across various third-party shopping services.

Symphony developed a multi-vendor marketplace that allowed third-party vendors to sell products through the client’s platform

Healthcare and Life Sciences

20,000 

Go-to-market 

B2C multi-vendor marketplace for a pharmaceutical products retailer 

12,000

The client, an e-commerce retailer of pickup truck accessories backed by private equity,  set out to offer engaging experiences to existing and potential consumers by utilizing the automotive e-commerce space. The client’s goal was to create a platform that eliminates the unease associated with initial purchases by showcasing how their accessories are utilized in real-life scenarios by actual individuals. Each post was created to include details about the specific products they used, with a direct link guiding users to the respective product page, where they can review, place orders, and more. 

The client reached out to Symphony to help with their go-to-market strategy with roadmap acceleration and agile expertise to speed up the development of the new ecosystem.

Our primary goal was to assist our client in their go-to-market strategy with a roadmap acceleration. 

In the first phase, we developed the backend solution of the wiki-style community hub, and we developed the necessary APIs to successfully connect the frontend and backend.

The solution allowed buyers, influencers, and end-users to share their pickup truck custom builds with the rest of the community, with comprehensive information on every product. By providing customers with the DIY community platform, Symphony helped the company drive omnichannel top-of-funnel customer engagement leveraging user-generated content, improving brand and consumer confidence, increasing conversion rates, and driving sales.

In phase 2, our emphasis shifted towards capturing customers' physical locations customizing their experience within the e-commerce ecosystem. Additionally, we introduced relevant local installation services at the point of a product purchase, aiming to streamline the shopping experience and enhance overall customer satisfaction by eliminating potential hurdles.

Symphony built a wiki-style community hub for a private equity-backed  e-commerce retailer of pickup truck accessories to help them drive customer engagement and increase sales

A community hub for a leading pickup truck accessories retailer

"Our objective was to build a platform to serve as the primary application that our local managers use every day to help them operate world-class veterinary hospitals. We dealt with different legacy systems and had to integrate across the various infrastructures used in our hospitals and clinics. We encountered multiple problems – the connection between each system, manual workarounds, and slow data processing, which we needed to solve. We were looking for a partner who would help us understand our team members’ needs and solve our challenges with a clear roadmap and without bloated scope. Symphony managed to successfully overcome these challenges with a platform that has become one of our largest and most successful projects to date. Their impact was not limited to building a digital solution, they also played a key role in understanding the end user to help the adoption of the solution across all clinics.
The efficiency and engagement of our team members have greatly improved, ultimately resulting in a substantial ROI. Symphony’s contribution didn’t just stop at project delivery; it went beyond and led to a differentiated product unique within the industry that has surpassed the expectations of our employees and investors."

The client, a veterinary practice management group backed by private equity and overseeing over 120 hospitals and clinics, struggled with legacy systems, manual processes, and operational inefficiencies. These challenges resulted in delays and inefficient data processing due to different formats and databases. This impacted the company and its dedicated animal health professionals, leading to issues such as low pay, compassion fatigue, burnout, lack of recognition, and limited opportunities for advancement.

Recognizing the need for a digital solution, the client approached Symphony to address these challenges and optimize its workflows. Symphony built a practice management system that not only streamlined operations but also empowered animal health professionals with data-driven, real-time insights.

Our primary objectives were to integrate and unify disparate systems and establish a framework for Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) defining and monitoring.

Initially, we engaged in design thinking research across a network of over 120 veterinary clinics to understand operational challenges and opportunities. This research highlighted several key areas for value creation, including optimized pricing, scheduling, and financial monitoring. Based on these insights, we defined operational needs and developed a detailed roadmap.

The core of our engagement was the development of a clinic management platform compatible with both web and mobile interfaces. The platform was designed to integrate seven third-party solutions, effectively consolidating various operational tools. 

We rolled up all systems into one unified platform, leading to significant operational improvements in several areas. It enhanced labor management and scheduling optimization, reducing overhead and increasing clinic productivity. By automating previously manual data handling processes, the platform minimized errors and saved time. It also offered real-time reporting features, allowing for more informed decision-making. Additionally, the platform improved financial monitoring, enabling better tracking of productivity and more effective pricing strategies. Overall, the solution not only streamlined day-to-day operations but also set a solid foundation for future growth. 

Symphony developed a practice management system for a private equity-backed veterinary group, integrating multi-source reporting and analytics to provide data-driven, real-time insights

Case Studies