First and foremost, Persistent Systems is a people-first company.
Like many modern companies, Persistent stores its data about people across multiple systems, but when sales opportunities come fast and furious, the company needs a global view to determine what people can be put on what projects. Persistent worked with StepZen1 (link resides outside of ibm.com), an IBM Company, to design, develop and launch a GraphQL data layer on its Microsoft SQL Server (MSSQL), Salesforce and Oracle back ends and then build a new “opportunity visibility app,” which employees and their managers use to get better visibility into trouble spots and close opportunities faster.
1StepZen is now part of IBM API Connect. This organization's purchase of the solution occurred before StepZen was acquired by IBM in February 2023, therefore StepZen is referred to as a standalone solution in this case study.
Thousands
of Persistent employees self-serve their way to account information using StepZen
Hours & days
of work saved at quarter-end with the help of StepZen
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.
Niranjan Arude, Lead Software Engineer in the office of the CIO, explains: “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 they 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.
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.
Persistent (link resides outside of ibm.com) is an award-winning digital engineering and enterprise modernization partner, combining deep technical expertise and industry experience to help its clients anticipate what’s next and answer questions before they’re asked.
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