Success Stories for MST Global Company

Vadim Parfenov

Chief technology Officer at MST Global

About the company

MST Global is a company based in Australia specializing in developing technology for safety, communication, and production management systems for mining and tunneling.

Situation

MST Global is a company based in Australia specializing in developing technology for safety, communication, and production management systems for mining and tunneling. Founded in 1990, the company serves more than 300 customers worldwide.

Historically, MST Global earned most of its revenue from hardware sales, and software was considered to be a complementary product. However, as technology evolved over the years, the prices the company could charge for hardware decreased. After MST Global was acquired, the new management team decided to revamp the company’s offerings to generate most of its revenue from software sales.

“To reach our software development goal, we started to develop a cloud-based platform called Helix that would be built with modern architecture and become the foundation for a new software product line,” said Chief Technology Officer Vadim Parfenov. “We wanted Helix to be based on a microservices architecture to enable fast release cycles and quick innovation so that we could dominate the market.”

Unfortunately, the MST Global team didn’t have prior experience working with microservices, and after a year, the company was still working on a few core services. It had not yet developed a delivery platform or client front end.

“It took us a long time to realize that we needed help,” said Vadim. “That’s when I started looking for a software development expert.” The expert Vadim found was Soft Pro Alliance.

Solution

The Soft Pro team came in and immediately conducted a gap analysis. They created a list of initiatives that would improve Helix’s architecture, change how MST Global approached delivery automation, and enable the implementation of the remaining software layers.

“The team quickly learned our company’s culture and understood our complex situation, identified gaps, and provided practical recommendations,” said Vadim. “Their systematic approach touched all areas of our software development lifecycle, including architecture, implementation, testing, and DevOps.”

Because there were significant gaps in the implementation of the Helix platform, the Soft Pro team shared its technology platform and helped quickly develop the remaining pieces.

The development involved:

  • Automating the delivery platform, which included test and production environments, CI/CD pipelines, and application deployments

  • Creating a microapplication UI development platform along with a few initial microapplications implemented in Angular

  • Developing facades to connect microapplications to the Helix back end and additional infrastructure microservices implemented in Pip.Services toolkit using Node.js

“The Soft Pro team did an amazing job on our project,” said Vadim. “Because of their impressive breadth of knowledge along with competitive rates, I would definitely recommend them to any company attempting to use microservices.”

Outcomes

  • Architectural guidance and team training that helped MTS Global adopt microservices, DevOps, and incremental delivery practices

  • A technological platform for developing backend microservices and web microapplications

  • A fully automated delivery platform with scripted environments, CI/CD pipelines, and multi-platform application deploymentsUX guidelines and UI style guide

  • A number of microapplications and facades to connect those microapplications to the back end

  • The cognitive load has decreased, which allows NOV to utilize cheaper off-shore resources and lower development costs

  • The ability to incrementally deliver software in a predictable cycle and utilize inexpensive outsourcing companies

Summary

MST Global successfully enters the software development arena thanks to assistance from Soft Pro Alliance.