Stewardship

This is a story of a London based charity organization and a Helsinki based Azure experts and how Stewardship and Mallow became inseparables

Already it´s out there, no reason to pretend, there is a feeling between Stewardship and Mallow. We know, because of Stewardship´s CTO Brett Mickelburgh put it out there in LinkedIn, celebrating the step shifting from hosting based on older on-prem technologies into Microsoft Azure cloud ecosystem.

“Significantly we have been supported by Mallow and Saratoga who truly are different gravy. I have worked with many partners who promise that they are an extension of your team, but very few get as close as these two have”, says Mickelburgh.

That is just the kindest way of putting it. But what is Saratoga? And wasn´t this supposed to be a story of a special feeling between London based Stewardship and Helsinki based Mallow? Can there be a triangle of feeling? The answer is, yes there can, but it needed the third partner to come from, let’s see, Cape Town, to say at least. And that is exactly where the South African software development partner behind Stewardship´s digital product comes from. But let’s hear it from the beginning.

Stewardship is a Christian charity organization, founded in 1906. It distributes over a hundred million pounds a year to some 6 000 charities and churches. The command centre of the charity’s funds distribution infrastructure is the giving software: the most complex, sophisticated and precious piece of software in possession of Stewardship – programmed and maintained in partnership with South African based Saratoga. A trusted and work proofed system but based on on-prem technologies. To put it short: after some 110 years in business, Stewardship decided to go Azure and move the giving system into the cloud.

“Just like Mallow, we needed to punch above our weight. We wanted more with less and we had a hunch, that with Azure we could build a solid foundation for the future”, says Mickelburgh.

Stewardship team met Mallow’s Principal Architect Teemu Tapanila few years back in London. Tapanila was freelancing for his previous employee. Together, they built the first blocks for Stewardship’s giving system in Azure technologies.

“To make a long story short: we started well with Teemu, then we lost him due to corporate policies. We were left with another service provider, who didn’t work. As soon as we had a chance to get Teemu back with Mallow, we contacted him. We quickly learned that meanwhile we had not proceeded at all and everything had to be started from scratch. But in the end, I think, this way we had a better end result, to have built the whole system together with Teemu and his team”, says Jonathan Ward, the head of environments, platforms and IT-security at Stewardship.

Tapanila emphasises that the commission was challenging, because they had to transfer an already existing complex software system in Azure, instead of constructing everything from zero.

“It took a long time, over a year, but at least we got a chance to get to know each other. It was fun, the whole South-African-Finnish-British-team clicked for a common purpose: to make Stewardship’s main engine run gracefully”, says Tapanila.

And gracefully it runs. One of the key benefits for Azure technologies compared to on-prem technologies is the agility and easiness to run product releases.

“With previous programming, it could take us anything from 4 to 16 weeks to deploy a product release. With Azure we were live hardly a week and we had already run our first update. It’s really flexible and an easy system to govern”, says Ward.

Stewardship’s enterprise architect Grant Owens enjoyed Mallow’s culture of sharing information and the honesty in consulting.

“The service Mallow produces is not a hit-and-run thing. They share their knowledge and don’t oversell. Teemu actually saved us money saying for example “don’t buy that, you are not going to need it, invest instead in this functionality”. We are definitely going to stay with Microsoft, Teemu has given us confidence. The most precious thing I guess is that we have been in this journey together and we have achieved good understanding of Azure and are mainly independent in maintenance and governance. That’s a solid foundation”, says Owens.

The good feeling travels in both directions. Tapanila feels, that Stewardship is a special partnership, also because of the organisations non-profit nature.

“It feels good to contribute to charity work, to be involved in something, that is socially responsible. So it’s like the job comes with a motivation bonus, because of what you are building, feels useful and meaningful”, says Tapanila.

Now that the giving system is up and running in the Azure-cloud, Stewardship and Mallow are looking forward to the future.

“We want Mallow as a long term partner. Whether it’s a small question or a big thing, we want Mallow to be around”, says Owens.