SECRETS OF ZFORT GROUP SUCCESS

For us, a good week involves eight or more hours of deep work, which is ample time to complete most straining tasks, and it's always a big pleasure to know that our efforts aren't in vain.

Today, we unveil some of the insider facts of one of our development teams. Our Chief Technology Officer Roman Korzh asked several questions so let’s dive in and explore how the products are built within Zfort Group.

Here is our customer Shane Wright who sharing his feedback about working with Zfort Group.

A few words about our client’s business:

Maru Group is a marketing services company. They apply the latest tech insights and knowledge to help their customers get the most of their marketing data.

� What’s Maru Group's primary technology focus?

� What are the key technology innovations they are going to bring into the product?

� Why did Maru Group choose Zfort Group?

Check more insights from the video interview below.

Podcast

Hi, thanks for accepting our invitation for a brief interview. Can you say just a few words about what the company does?

Sure, absolutely. So, Maru is a marketing services business. We primarily execute marketing research projects in North America through the US, through Canada to the UK. To a lesser degree international and multi-market projects.

We execute a wide variety and types of research, but primarily a short ad hoc pieces of market research to concept tests. Basically test new kinds of packaging, new adverts, things like that.

Longer ongoing tracker programmes, customer experience programmes, where we may run a project for many years and interact with a client’s customers after they’ve touched around in some way. Whether they bought something or called a contact center.

So the business is split into two halves. An advisory half where we have a team of researchers who analyze the data, who manage projects, who engage with clients, who produce insights, and who report on the data.

The back of the business (where I sit), where we build and operate the technology platform that all of the projects across the whole group are run on. Zfort Group helps us to build and expand the platform to service clients in all markets that we’re operating.

Cool. So what is your current technology focus and do you think you will introduce anything new to the technology stack of Maru?

Okay. It’s a fairly broad platform, deliberately in the half platform, the half eco-system is a collection of many discreet applications each of which focuses on a particular capability, whether it’s a server or a dashboard, video collection, analytics, or a specific way of interacting with a respondent.

Each of these applications is a separate stand-alone piece of software. Most of them are PHP or Linux with a Postgres backend. But there’s a variety of different applications. We’re agnostic about the tech stack. So some C# or .NET; no Java yet, surprisingly. And most - not all yet but most - dockerized running Kubernetes clusters, multiple clusters than we self-manage, that are geographically local to the office and the clients that we serve.

So in terms of where we go going forward. More containerization, more dockerization, I think it’s a necessity, so we manage a fairly broad application stack and a broad workload. And we’ll scale that both in terms of the number of applications and number of capabilities, but also the volume and the metadata that we collect to run the process.

What’s exciting and new at the moment is video. I don’t think we do enough media processing at the moment. I don’t think we do enough in AI or in analytics. So those are going to be growth areas for us in the over the next year or two.

As well as generally continuing to add new applications and new capabilities either through building them ourselves, so the development teams in Southampton, within Zfort Group, and the team in North America all requiring more technology businesses who have a fully-built or part-built capability that we’re interested and want to integrate and bring in to the platform.

Awesome. My final question is: If I asked you to name one thing that is best about Zfort developers, what do you say it is?

Wow. Um, there’s probably a few things I suppose. They’re very-very capable developers. They work very well together as a team and they interact well with the business. Sounds like a bad thing, but one of the strongest qualities is reliability, in a sense. In that, plans are communicated well, they are followed. When we need something or we need a particular report or we need a particular status output, the team are very good at finding the solution and making it happen, and proactively following up with this. And I think that’s crucial in many ways.

Obviously, they’re technically good too, otherwise, we would not have the team in the first place. We’ve been able to efficiently work with them and not need to chase or not need to try to work out what’s going on. That’s fantastic, it means a lot to us.

Thank you very much for your feedback, we’re looking forward to working with you for years to come!

Great! And very much the same!