Peter Lorenz
Managing Director
peter.lorenz@akra.de
+49 40 309535 40
From internal tool to customer success
x-ion
2020
Meet x-ion, the cloud pioneer
On behalf of a large German trade union, x-ion developed an online portal through which employees covered by collective bargaining agreements can obtain supplementary long-term care insurance across the industry. In addition to video counseling, the portal also enables the booking of appointments for on-site and online counseling as well as the administration and filing of insurance documents. Via individual portal sections, the affiliated companies, their employees and the consultants of the participating insurance companies can access the portal.
The Client
x-ion GmbH, which has been growing continuously since 2009, is a provider of customized cloud and infrastructure solutions. The company focuses on the conception, development and operation of technologically challenging and customized software and cloud solutions. The use and further development of innovative technologies and frameworks is a matter of course for the pioneer in the cloud business.
The Challenge
In addition to software on behalf of customers, the x-ion development team also repeatedly develops internal applications that are tailored to the individual requirements of x-ion GmbH. One of these is xCRM, which is used to manage and organize customers, suppliers, and employees. In close cooperation with x-ion, this internal application was now to be individualized and expanded.
The Solution
In mid-2019, we started adapting xCRM, which had been developed for internal purposes until then, for an online portal. Since then, x-ion has been continuously developing the application with our support: In addition to optimizing the existing software, new functions are regularly added. One of the features requested by the customer, for example, was an appointment tool that can be used to set up and book consulting appointments and to carry them out in person or via an integrated video call. All the necessary documents are generated in the portal and, once the consultation has been completed, are stored and made available to all the parties involved, in this case the company, the insurance company and the employees.
Services
- We now support the growing team of software developers, DevOps, QA experts and project managers on the customer side in all areas of software development. Before new features are deployed, we regularly run pipelines with linters or unit tests to increase code quality. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, we also write integration tests that test the application directly in the development pipeline.
Methods
- The x-ion development team works according to an individual structure and uses tools such as Scrum and Kanban. Kanban is extended by weekly refinements to discuss tickets and tasks. Results and progress are presented to stakeholders, product owners and the team every four weeks in reviews. Subsequent retrospectives round off the project phase.
Technologies
- The operation of this project is realized in the cloud infrastructure of x-ion - among others consisting of Ceph and OpenStack Kubernetes. In the backend, the portal is implemented with Ruby on Rails and the frontend in React.
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