Innovative eLearning Solution for Professional Corporate Training

Business challenges

Our client, a leading training development company that provides interactive web and mobile e-learning solutions through its online, cloud-based platform, encountered new technological challenges as demand for their services started growing at an unprecedented pace.

The platform allows companies to organize corporate trainings using engaging video tutorials, online courses, webinars, interactive templates, and other user-centric content. The platform reinforces learning within organizations and encourages users to acquire and apply new skills to achieve higher work efficiency. Our client’s solution is also aimed at changing employees’ work habits and lifestyles to create a more motivated and dynamic workplace.

In addition, the platform’s flexible nature allows for customizations to cater to specific corporate needs and the goals of end customers.

From the very beginning of this e-learning website project, Intellias has been client’s strategic engineering partner, providing full-scale, end-to-end product development from research to the marketplace. With the platform rapidly making headway in the market, the client decided to adopt an entirely new business model that required implementing the most up-to-date practices in the development process. Their new competitive strategy called for advanced technological competencies in Cloud, Big Data, and DevOps. Intellias value-added services naturally fit that need.

Innovative e-learning solution delivered

Consistent successful delivery of platform upgrades and new functionality over the course of many years gave the client the confidence to pass their entire engineering process to Intellias, leaving only product ownership on their side. Intellias has become client’s single development provider for the cloud-based e-learning solution.

Implementation of innovative features

The platform is designed to stir users’ desire to learn by providing a constant stream of targeted learning resources in a variety of formats. It uses machine learning to display the most relevant content to users. The platform delivers personalized learning experiences and measures the impact of training with the help of these engaging and interactive tools:

• Skill paths

Short, easy-to-understand videos united by a shared theme make up a skill path that takes the learner through a productivity-focused program. Training courses are either assigned or recommended to employees based on their job roles, skill sets, and unique professional needs. Once a learner is through a course, they complete a quiz and can share their results with colleagues.

• Gamification badges and ratings

The gamified approach to learning includes achievement badges, assessments, and company standings to motivate healthy professional competition within the company.

• Communication tools

To keep employees engaged and informed about new assignments and upcoming live events, communications are personalized through a powerful mailing engine. Users receive notifications, reminders, and announcements via consolidated or individual emails and MS Teams chatbots.

• Performance tracking and engagement reports

Companies get deep insights into employee learning behavior, user progress, and training effectiveness through customizable analytics dashboards. Based on the data in these dashboards, employers can further improve the company’s educational processes and incentive mechanisms.

Development hub

We built a strong development organization for the client, bringing on over 50 senior engineers — and counting. Our five teams provide end-to-end software development services, from requirements analysis and design to production and database management. Team members work cross-functionally, taking on a variety of on-demand roles as the need arises.

Each end-to-end team is responsible for a specific business domain:

• The engagement team analyzes customer behavior and devises quizzes and email campaigns to encourage users to continue learning.
• Two content teams are responsible for integrating the content consumed by users into the system. The platform includes video sessions, guides, assessments, resources, practice files, and more.
• The people team deals with users, roles, and groups. This team provides services to simplify the onboarding of new customers and to help end users in QuickHelp.
• The account and security team has built a single mechanism for identification and authorization that allows for synchronized access using a single sign-on. The team has also provided a full set of security measures to comply with GDPR requirements.

As we’ve worked on our client’s innovative e-learning platform, our engineers have participated in a series of workshops and brainstorming sessions where each team member can chime in on how the new system should be implemented. Our ideas and suggestions have laid the groundwork for BrainStorm’s brand-new product that’s already in the works.

Overcoming major challenges

We handle the most complicated technological and process challenges brought about by the market, client’s business needs, and the rapid growth of the platform.

• Moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices

One of Intellias most significant initiatives was the move from a monolithic to a microservices architecture. With a massive inflow of customers to the platform over the years and a new business model adopted by the client, there came the need for much greater scalability of the system.

Intellias experts from our digital consulting services suggested a scalable microservices architecture that could provide near-infinite expansion of the platform. We encouraged the use of the latest technologies and approaches to implement this new architecture. Our engineers are now building a new system where each service will have its own database and infrastructure. This will simplify infrastructure maintenance and allow us to scale services separately depending on the specific load on each of them.

• Handling high loads

As the number of users is growing fast, one of our goals is to build a system that can withstand a much higher load. Our client’s new platform uses Microsoft Azure to ensure seamless scaling of the system by automatically growing its resources and thus increasing the load capacity many times over.

• Speeding up production

To keep up with the pace of the e-learning industry, we initiated a transition from biweekly releases to a continuous delivery process, where new features and updates go into production within a day or two. This gives us clear visibility into the product’s current state and reduces the risk of detecting issues far into development.

DevOps practices

From the very beginning, our team approached the development of the platfrom with a DevOps mindset. We helped our client cut infrastructure costs by 20% by reviewing resource utilization, optimizing pricing tiers, and setting up auto-scaling policies for resources. We then continued to establish a set of practices to optimize the implementation of our client’s new SaaS platform and built an entire DevOps culture around that process. From the DevOps perspective, our key achievements include:

• Automated deployment pipeline

Our team transformed the product delivery flow from manual and scheduled deployments to automated and frequent deployments. We refactored the delivery pipeline with built-in Quality Gates: every commit that passes through the gates successfully is automatically deployed to the production environment. This mechanism triggers multiple automated deploys without any manual action on the developer’s part.

As a result, we simplified the process of bringing changes to the environment and improved the development velocity of our teams, who can now support the infrastructure of their services themselves without the assistance of infrastructure engineers.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

We set up the project’s infrastructure according to IaC principles, so the entire infrastructure is written in code and can be built instantly with the push of a button. If there’s a need to build an application from scratch in a new region, using a unified script, we can automatically create an identical environment with all the resources needed to run the platform’s components.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are used for provisioning environments and are executed with an identical and repeatable process. Any configuration changes to the environment are made automatically in an infrastructure release pipeline, and infrastructure changes are included in the code review process.

• Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

By following the CI/CD methodology, where deployment happens based on readiness, our team accelerated the product rollout dozens of times over. Because developers don’t have to wait for the release date and can merge their changes at once, any issues can be quickly spotted and fixed. All new features go through the Quality Gates, which include unit tests, component tests, code inspection, and other types of tests. If all these steps are passed successfully, a feature is automatically launched into production.

Thanks to the introduction of CI/CD automation, we turned such critical events as production releases, infrastructure changes, and disaster recovery into a stress-free routine for our development teams.

Business outcome

After twelve years of partnership, Intellias has become the bedrock of the platform development. We’ve created a tight bond with our client
in working on their flagship product. Our client completely trusts us in all aspects of product development, including in the choice of technologies, delivery, staffing, team structure, and other important decisions.

We’ve developed a productive synergy that has allowed the client to win such reputable clients as Visa, PepsiCo, and Deloitte. We’ve also
implemented necessary customizations to respond to end users’ individual preferences and needs. Today, the training platform allows over two million active users worldwide to access thousands of training videos, track their expertise, get recommendations, organize their personal libraries, upload and share their own videos, and participate in online instructor-led training sessions.

Our client has started naturally expanding their presence in the $200+ billion e-learning market, acquiring new customers in Europe, Asia, and Australia. As more and more organizations start to see tangible ROI as a result of the increased professional skills of their employees, the demand for custom training solutions is growing. With Intellias vast engineering capacity at their disposal, our client will continue to surge ahead with their innovative, on-demand e-learning products.