Introducing a new platform for strategic growth
Broadlume, backed by private equity firm PSG, is the world’s largest provider of digital technology to the flooring industry. The company provides the only all-in-one marketing and management platform for local retailers that want to grow their revenue, streamline their operations and maximize their profits.
Broadlume has accumulated dozens of legacy applications over the course of multiple mergers and acquisitions.
This wealth of functionality has created immense value for Broadlume’s clients, and end users were looking for even more seamless integration between applications. Additionally, Broadlume was faced with the challenge of supporting multiple tech stacks and frameworks, which affected its speed of development and its ability to resource projects sufficiently.
All told, it was difficult managing architecture and roadmap strategy alongside maintenance and short-term needs. Broadlume knew it needed to seek outside expertise to help.
“We’re not trying to replace our team,” said Sean Bave, Broadlume’s president and COO. “We’re trying to get some support — in a cost-effective way, as fast as possible — to help our team move our platform forward for our customers.”
With limited budgets and past unsuccessful work with offshore development teams still fresh in mind, a new, more flexible approach was required: a combination of strategic guidance and offshore talent, which would enable Broadlume to increase its development bandwidth and technical expertise without the overhead of hiring new employees.
To address these challenges, Broadlume turned to York IE’s Product Strategy and Development practice. York IE complemented Broadlume with a hybrid onshore and offshore team: a U.S.-based product strategist, who provided strategy and oversight, plus India-based full stack development teams out of the firm’s Ahmedabad office.
The work started with several point projects, allowing York IE to ramp up its knowledge of Broadlume’s industry and platform specifics while Broadlume assessed the overall quality of the engagement.
There were several early successes that led to a continued deepening of the partnership. York IE’s development of a centralized API platform and comprehensive documentation suite, for example, showcased the firm’s cloud computing expertise and enabled its teams to more rapidly familiarize themselves with Broadlume’s technology.
At the same time, Broadlume faced a looming deadline to migrate 1,700 customers to a new platform within a matter of months. And migrating them one by one wasn’t feasible, given the time constraints alongside other high-priority research and development projects. York IE was able to architect and implement a complex reverse proxy to complete all customer migrations to the new product in just one month.
Additionally, Broadlume quickly recognized a key difference in working with York IE: The entire team adopts a video-on culture and joins Zoom calls to improve collaboration.
“In the past, I’ve done work with firms where everybody is offshore, and it’s hard to get that same level of accountability,” Bave said. “And with the cameras off, it’s very disconnected. York IE is an integrated part of the team.”
The partnership offered several additional advantages:
Maintenance and innovation: York IE’s hybrid model enabled Broadlume to continue supporting its existing platform while accelerating its R&D pipeline. By offloading maintenance tasks and bug fixes to York IE, Broadlume was able to focus its senior engineers on more strategic R&D initiatives, which York IE supported with consistent, high-quality product management and development.
Specialized expertise and flexible resource allocation: York IE’s ability to pull in resources with expertise in different programming languages and frameworks was crucial for tackling specific aspects of projects, especially around legacy code migration and integration. The flexibility to bring in developers and engineers with expertise in outdated technologies proved invaluable.
“Relying on York IE to pull in a resource that knows specialized technologies has certainly been a value-add,” Bave said. “We don’t really want to be coding in certain languages anymore, but we need that expertise to understand how a current application works so that we can make it better or rewrite it.”
Faster onboarding time: Broadlume had York IE’s team fully integrated within one to two months, compared to a typical three-month timeframe for a new employee.
“Being able to get a squad up and running relatively quickly and providing additional support, whether it’s for customers or new initiatives, has been impactful,” Bave said.
Navigating product development is a journey. Through initial shorter-term projects, specialized architectural assessments and longer-term full-stack development engagements, Broadlume has found an end-to-end partner in York IE with the following results:
Cost savings: Broadlume reduced its development costs by 15%.
Increased development speed: York IE’s hybrid approach enabled faster progress on both platform maintenance and new product development. Broadlume was also able to improve its speed of project completion.
Critical project success: York IE’s expertise was instrumental in meeting a hard deadline for a critical end-of-year migration project, ensuring uninterrupted service for Broadlume’s clients.
Modernization and consolidation: Broadlume consolidated its cloud infrastructure from five providers onto Amazon Web Services, enhancing its application coverage and increasing efficiency. York IE also helped the company modernize its legacy applications and APIs.
“The York IE hybrid approach has been a game changer,” Bave said. “We are better able to support our existing platform and meet customer needs, while also moving through our new R&D pipeline faster.”
The partnership with York IE has positioned Broadlume for continued success. The consistent and integrated support from York IE has not only helped Broadlume manage its current platform and development needs but also paved the way for future growth and innovation. With York IE as a reliable partner, Broadlume can confidently pursue new opportunities, knowing it has the expertise and flexibility to overcome any challenge.
15% reduction in development costs
Over $600,000 in development savings
30% faster ramp-up time than a typical employee
80% cloud provider consolidation