DCASTech APERTURE

Challenge
DCASTechnologies is the premier provider of online lead generation and validation solutions in the consumer marketing & advertising space. After having gained momentum in the Lead Generation industry with its flagship product ASCEND, also developed by SSD, DCASTech realized the opportunity for a related offering targeted at an adjacent industry segment. The product would allow publishers, database owners and ad networks to reliably validate the accumulated leads eliminating incomplete or inaccurate information collected from consumers through co-registration online forms. The company came back to SSD to contract the development of its next product called APERTURE that was meant to help ad networks and publishers to raise the quality level associated with the leads they were selling, and, thus, to competitively differentiate themselves by the increased conversion rates.

Result
As a result of an even greater cost-efficiency combined with reduced time-to-market, DCASTech APERTURE became an even greater success contributing to the company's prosperity. The product scrubs invalid information and cleans the marketing leads before they leave the publishers' networks. That enables clients to make proactive business decision about their data processes and adjust infrastructure in real-time. APERTURE reduces the number of false-positive leads by up to 80%, and starts at as low as $.022 per scrubbed lead that allows DCASTech to position the product as substantially more efficient and cost-effective than the competitors' offerings. DCASTech remained profitable and growing regardless of the worst economic environment in years 2008-2009.

Action
Following the reliable collaboration processes perfected with DCASTech during the development of its prior product ASCEND, SSD leveraged the leanings from that experience to attain an even greater cost-efficiency, development speed and end-product quality for its second engagement with the client.

  • Assigned the same project manager who worked with DCASTech before and, thus, was familiar with the industry, company's business goals, and product requirements. As a result, the architecture and the technical specification for the new product were prepared at a fraction of time spent at the requirement gathering stage of the initial product.
  • Assigned the same dedicated engineering team who worked on DCASTech ASCEND. The legacy of team's domain knowledge and familiarity with DCASTech main product, allowed for maximum code reuse, increased speed, reduced costs and improved quality that would have been impossible to attain elsewhere.
  • Created clear project roadmap and schedule that took into account the possibility for frequent requirements changes, and included an even more accurate list of all foreseeable project threats and risks.
  • Followed the established communication processes that included daily voice communication with DCASTech CTO, regular progress tracking and status reporting, as well as proactive inquiries from SSD engineers about unclear or imprecise aspects of the product to ensure the development was on the right track.
  • Utilized the established repository for change request management to make sure every request made by the client and every bug found by the Quality Assurance team were taken care of in the order of its priority with respect to the available time and resources.
  • Began systematic Quality Assurance early in the product development life-cycle to bring down the cost of issue resolution and to ensure product's early launch.

APERTURE Highlights

  • Offers plug-and-play lightweight configuration of a self-service tool, enabling clients to start processing the incoming leads within minutes
  • Has user friendly UI
  • Performs real-time verification, batch data reception, monitoring, reporting and delivery
  • Validates consumer leads in a number of ways, including:
    • Sophisticated email address validation via a proprietary neural-based domain correction application
    • Area code validation and prefix matching on phone information
    • CASS-compliant postal address verification and correction
    • Email address matching against a proprietary 70mil record hard bounce file
    • Records passing against a profanity filter
    • …and many others
  • Provides daily reporting back to advertisers or to the internal quality assurance teams to evaluate the quality of driven leads.
Technologies and Tools Used
- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, C#, ASP.NET 2.0, Javascript; Microsoft AJAX
- Microsoft SQL Server 2005
- Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0; Web Services; XSL Transformations
- MatchIT Data Cleansing Suite; Rebex File Transfer Pack; Syncfusion Enterprise Development Components; QAS address management software
- Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
- Borland StarTeam 2005, Microsoft Project 2003
"Over the last three years, Effective Solutions has proven to be a reliable, professional and a cost effective partner. Their expertise with Microsoft technologies coupled with their flexible and responsive approach helped us rapidly prototype and develop sophisticated marketing data management system. We are planning to continue our business relationship with Effective Solutions, and I feel very comfortable bringing new projects to this company."
Dmitriy Dvoskin
DCASTechnologies, CTO