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Case study

Terminus

Terminus is the only account-based engagement platform built to deliver more pipeline and revenue through multi-channel account-based marketing (ABM).

With multiple product acquisitions over the years, Terminus has a very interesting mix of complexity and growth that really allowed the Valor Software team to shine. As Terminus has grown, we have been able to come alongside them and help break down organizational silos and spread knowledge.

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Deliverables

The Valor team had a chance to contribute to multiple modules of the Terminus platform with development and modernization activities.

Deliverable 1

Development and maintenance
of the Ad Experiences module

We’re helping to enhance the capabilities of the module for targeted ad placement that allows users to run ad campaigns across nearly 70 different networks and over hundreds of thousands of websites. In particular, we implemented a completely new logic behind the reporting system that allows deriving exactly the data users need from the data lake and transforming it into handy yet detailed reports. Also, we’re extending the functionality of Ad Experiences and making it even more intuitive and user-friendly.

Technologies & services

Frontend

Backend

Challenge

Massive amounts of data

To ensure Terminus users get accurate reports on their ad campaigns, we had to find a way to structure and process massive amounts of data coming from different sources to the data lake.

Solution

    To solve the problem of poorly-structured data, we’ve added a new complicated functionality for deriving data in the needed format. We used the Amazon Athena to query data from the data lake and analyze it. Since Amazon Athena still gives out data in a “raw” format, we added a PostgreSQL database to the reporting pipeline using Ruby for the reports’ backend logic. This backend solution helps organize data, structure it, and bring it to the format suitable for reports. What’s more, it gives an opportunity for caching.

Diagram

Impact

With the implementation of new functionality and a new reporting flow, Terminus can serve their clients even better with their advanced data processing algorithms and provide more accurate and well-structured reports.

Challenge

Intuitive admin interface

Since Terminus users reach out to hundreds and sometimes even thousands of companies, they need extended filtering options to process reports, compare the efficiency of different campaigns, and pick the best approach for the next run. Also, the client wanted to empower marketing teams with more options for targeting their campaigns and provide an intuitive admin interface to save time for setup.

Solution

We’ve implemented new functionality on the backend so Terminus users have a wider choice of approaches for running digital ads and can measure campaigns’ performance. Getting more precise analytics on how the target audience reacts to the received offers, marketing teams can tailor their approach.

Also, we redesigned API endpoints for the creation of ad campaigns using GO, tackled issues with microservice architecture, and tuned the performance of the module.

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Campaign performance

We’ve also added a new option to aggregate data on numerous campaigns at once and view expenses.

Finally, we’ve created a new homepage for Ad Experiences with a modernized layout and improved usability and added numerous endpoints that describe the work of components

Overview

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Report

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Impact

  • More powerful campaigns with newly added functionality and deepened analytics on target audience engagement
  • Improved targeting of prospects thanks to advanced filters and parameters
  • New homepage and modernized UX and UI contribute to a holistic user experience
  • Test coverage with medium tests for integration.

Deliverable 2

Migration to Angular and modernization of the Data Studio and Measurement Studio

Terminus Data Studio allows defining and finding the most relevant audiences to target sales and marketing campaigns at maximum efficiency. Users get access to deep firmographic data on 70 million businesses provided by Terminus and build custom target account lists! While Measurement Studio helps users measure and streamline their entire revenue strategy. We’ve had a great deal of success here in migrating the applications to modern Angular rails and reorganizing the codebase for higher visibility and usability.

Challenge

Migration challenge

Initially, Data and Measurement Studio were one single application with a shared codebase in AngularJS. This code had many lines and dependencies that could affect the stability and viability of the solution in the future. Also, we wanted to ensure that Data and Measurement Studio can scale as the number of users grow, and there always be engineers who can understand the code and manage it painlessly. For this and other reasons we migrated the application to a modern engine.

Solution

We’ve separated Data Studio and Measurement Studio into two applications and migrated the code from Angular.js to Angular. Also, to make Angular codebase even lighter and simplify app management, our team’s initiative was to implement Nx. It makes an application a set of libraries that can serve different modules of the system with no extra code required.

To make Angular codebase even lighter and simplify app management, our team’s initiative was to implement Nx.
It makes an application a set of libraries that can serve different modules of the system with no extra code required. Also, we boosted the app performance.

Before
After

Impact

  • Better code readability, clarity, and maintainability thanks to modular architecture
  • Improved application performance
  • Improved code linting, testing, and scaling with Nx
  • Lighter codebase with clear structure and reusable components
  • Simplified process of development and more accessible testing with the Angular CLI
  • 90% Unit test coverage!!

Deliverable 3

New cloud service
for the Email Experiences module

Email Experiences equips users with a set of dynamic tools to create unique emailing campaigns with customized messages and banners. Powerful insights on prospects’ interaction with the emails help teams skyrocket their marketing strategy and draw in more clients.

Valor’s team has a chance to integrate a new cloud infrastructure that elevates Email Experiences reliability and performance. What’s more, we’re introducing particular fixes and polishing to enable new functionality for emails and styles.

Challenge

Scalability challenges

As Email Experiences grows, it needs a more modern compute power to ensure high performance and stability. Also, it becomes harder for the team to monitor the state of numerous services. Our goal here was to find a more suitable solution instead of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and KOPS (Kubernetes Operations System) which took too much time to restart a container or handle a request.

Solution

We migrated the application from EC2 and KOPS to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and streamlined the deployment, scaling, and management of the clusters within the module.

Impact

  • Reduced costs for configuration management
  • Hassle-free management of Kubernetes control plane
  • Simplified cluster maintenance, additional security and support for the cluster from AWS
  • Improved performance and stability

Deliverable 3

Brand New functionality
for Chat Experiences

Terminus Chat Experiences transforms how companies engage with their prospects and customers. The Terminus chatbot creates a more relevant buyer journey the moment someone lands on a website. With Chat Experiences, convert more qualified visitors, route leads to a sales team faster, and book more meetings.

Chat Experiences offers customization of the interface to fit the company’s style. Valor had an exciting experience working with complicated chat algorithms and adding to users’ capabilities to draw quality inbound traffic.

Frontend

Backend

Challenge

Delivering featurs, improving quality

Terminus wanted to offer users a sophisticated experience with the chat and a handy admin page, so first the Valor team had particular flaws to address, and then boost the admin dashboard and chat with new significant functionality.

Solution

Making bug fixing alongside the implementation of new features, we polished the UI part of the admin page and extended the chat capabilities.

Now Chat Experiences offers even more options for customization to users:
the opportunity to create bots powered by artificial intelligence and unique playbooks for different audiences.

Impact

  • Advanced customization that implies AI-powered bots
  • Unique playbooks to serve requests of different audiences
  • Modernized admin panel with improved UI

Future

Terminus never stops growing and empowering sales and marketing teams worldwide with cutting-edge tools for account-based marketing to execute personalized campaigns and deliver greater performance. We’re happy and proud to be part of the upcoming metamorphosis of the Terminus platform and adopt a newly acquired module called Customer data platform. Currently, Valor Software is building up a team to fine-tune the existing functionality of this product and then – add new groundbreaking features to it.

Also, we’ll continue optimizing the platform performance and migrate particular services from Node.js to Go to get the most out of the microservices architecture. We’ve done a lot so far, and yet Valor team has much knowledge to share and improvement to bring! Stay tuned!

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