Modernization of Retail Merchandising Services (RMS) Application

Challenge

This large retail corporation was in the process of modernizing their core RMS application over to the cloud by integrating Apache Kafka. They initially decided to partner with an offshore integration vendor to assemble a team of developers for repeatable tasks, while their internal team managed the architecture and complex integration efforts so the code in production ran successfully on the new platform. Their goal was to complete the work over a two-year sprint and come in below budget by leveraging offshore support. At first the project was going well, but over a six-month period, the quality started to suffer from constant turnover, along with their internal employees becoming burnt-out with off-hour emergencies due to time zone differences. They began looking for new ways to supplement their current offshore engagement with a trusted onshore partner to help manage the vendor relationship and bring in subject matter expertise with Kafka solutions.