Challenge
First and foremost, Persistent is a people-first company. Like many modern companies, the data about the people is distributed across multiple systems, but when sales opportunities come fast and furious, a global view is needed to determine what people can be put on what projects. Persistent worked with StepZen to design, develop, and launch a GraphQL data layer on its MSSQL, Salesforce, and Oracle backends and then build a new “opportunity visibility app”, which is used by employees and their managers to get better visibility into trouble spots and close opportunities faster..
Solution
Persistent built a new app that allowed people in the CIO's office to quickly assemble one view of an opportunity.
GraphQL, and how StepZen delivers GraphQL made a big difference to the CIO’s team. They were quickly able to GraphQL-ize their legacy systems, and then connect data across them.
According to Niranjan Arude, Lead Software Engineer in the office of the CIO:
Getting the opportunity successfully closed in the system is critical for us to recognize revenue. We have data scattered across multiple systems, and the process had been very manual. With StepZen, we were able to quickly build one API against which we built an app. Now we save critical hours and days at the end of the quarter and recognize revenue faster."
Once this was done, the team at Persistent realized that it can further democratize the application, and allow thousands of Persistent employees to self-serve their way to account information. Of course, that required the right access controls and StepZen made that easy to do.
What's next?
Persistent is now expanding with StepZen to implement other revenue generation and recognition opportunities. Importantly, the team is doing it without any help from StepZen engineers – they are self-serving their way to business-critical new use cases.