sets up a global hub for continuous innovation of its product suite
Challenges
IDDINK group made a strategic shift from acquisition-led growth and embarked on a challenging pursuit of becoming an end-to-end software platform for the education sector through internal innovation.
Solution
Impressed with its successful track record of enabling innovation for many similar product businesses, IDDINK partnered coMakeIT to set up a global hub for continuous innovation of its product suite and execute its platform strategy.
Impact and Business Value
The India-based global innovation hub consisting of multiple scrum teams was set up and quickly scaled in less than a year to support, stabilize, modernize, and innovate IDDINK’s suite of products.
About IDDINK
IDDINK Group is a leading provider of educational services in the Benelux region, and consists of the following key business units and product lines:
- Magister, school information system primarily for secondary education
- EduaArte, school information system primarily for vocational education
- Iddink, distribution of learning materials
for secondary education
IDDINK serves nearly 80% of secondary and vocational schools in the Netherlands and more than 2 million students, parents, teachers, and administrators use its products and services on a daily basis. From the distribution of school books to managing school systems and providing an online portal for delivering customized learning material, IDDINK offers a full-spectrum of educational services.
“ coMakeIT helped us recruit highly-skilled developers and architects with expertise in diverse technologies. What we liked most was the fact that our management team was able to personally interview and select from a pool of experienced professionals. coMakeIT further helped us to integrate them with our teams in the Netherlands through frequent travel, and now they innovate, collaborate, and deliver seamlessly as a unified team. ”
–Winfried van Holland, CTO, IDDINK Group
Challenges
As IDDINK made a strategic shift to become an end-to-end software platform for the education sector, it faced the following challenges:
- maintain and support aging technology stacks across multiple product lines
- modernize legacy applications and support cloud deployments
- new feature development to keep up with changing regulations
- innovate and transform into a provider of customized student-centric learning solutions
Solution
The strategic partnership with coMakeIT enabled IDDINK to:
- recruit and build a high-quality team with skills in diverse technologies such as Delphi, Java, Javascript, Docker, Kubernetes etc.
- set up a global innovation hub and establish a distributed software factory in India
- quickly scale up to a 40-member operation spread across 7 scrum teams (organized as mixed-scrum teams with equal participation from the Netherlands and India)
- adopt an integrated process and unified workflow to execute seamlessly; systematically transfer domain expertise to the India-based teams through continuous in-person training and knowledge transfer in the Netherlands and India
Impact and Business value
The strategic partnership with coMakeIT helped IDDINK to:
- establish a global innovation hub with the needed technology and process expertise
- overcome skill shortages and capacity constraints
- take control of code base of products that were acquired or were under development with partners
- Maintain and support legacy stack built with million+ lines of code
- Initiate plans for application and deployment modernization