A genuine partnership helping Sympa on their path towards growth

Arttu Heikkilä is experienced in directing programme development, and is accustomed to creating solutions with the professionals in his own product development team. As an accomplished director in a product development organization, Heikkilä is also experienced in obtaining consultation from dozens of both foreign and domestic providers. Just over a year ago, in charge of developing Sympa -- an HR system undergoing rapid growth and internationalization -- Heikkilä was facing a difficult problem.

"We were extensively modernizing our Azure environment and needed experienced architecture support." — Arttu Heikkilä

Mallow was able to help Sympa with problems they had encountered in their programme development. Heikkilä had been about to sign a contract with another Azure consultant, who had had to withdraw, but had advised him that Jani Nevalainen, Mallow's Azure architect, may be the man for the job.

We reviewed Sympa's needs together and asked Mallow to assess the situation and propose tailored solutions. The collaboration worked from the start.

Result -- a genuine partnership

Nevalainen says that when he began the assignment, never at any point did he see it as a hit-and-run style task.

"In software engineering, dynamic usually means complex. You don't fix this with one trick. You modernize architecture systematically." — Jani Nevalainen

Mallow began the project from a DevOps perspective, but as the tasks went through the Azure environment, they soon became about creating and implementing a new architecture. Thus, the Mallow team has now moved on from the infra creation of its early days to product development, and both Sympa's performance and its Azure costs are considerably more reasonable.

It was a strong example of a customer modernizing both product and product development process with clear intent.

Heikkilä looks back on the beginnings of the partnership:

"Jani joined our team and quickly showed us solutions that worked. That gave the collaboration a productive start."

We're more than a year down the line and we're still working together. Sympa now uses modern Azure blocks and Azure enables the efficiency and actions that Sympa needs to run its operations. Heikkilä says he's also been pleasantly surprised that through its network of contacts and experience, Mallow has opened doors to Microsoft. Through a reinforced partnership, Sympa now receives more help than before from Microsoft. Indeed, Heikkilä describes the collaboration with Mallow as a genuine partnership.

What We Achieved

• Modernized core Azure architecture in a controlled way.
• Improved performance while lowering Azure cost levels.
• Strengthened Sympa's internal Azure capability.

"Sympa and Mallow have formed a genuine partnership, and we're now on a joint journey."