Mangala Karunaratne, Calcey’s founder and CEO, recounted the company’s decade-long journey to success with fond nostalgia. “It all began in my Dad’s old office premises at Kularatne Mawatha in Maradana, where we had just two developers. I used to work in the Silicon Valley for Nortel Networks as a Product Manager, and then during the dot COM bust I decided to start this business. Being an astute entrepreneur at heart, my dad encouraged me to use the relationships I had forged in the States and start an offshore consulting business. Our first software development client was Taleo Corporation, for whom we developed a world-class knowledge base. We never looked back.”

Today, Calcey Technologies is a multi-million dollar consulting business housed in a four-story building at Seibel Avenue Kirilapona, with 60 dedicated staff and furnished with all amenities.

“We served many famous names along the way, like WikiMedia Foundation, Hoya ConBio, BNBuilders, or JiWire Inc,” says Mangala. “One particular client relationship that blossomed into a great partnership was that with Compare Networks, a giant in the Biotechnology marketing space. We began by providing BPO services for managing their Web content, and ended up developing an entire platform to manage their online B2B marketplaces. We’ve done business with Compare for over 5 years to date, and I must say we hit it off really well with them.”

Calcey provides an array of technology consulting services such as Web Development, Software Development, Cloud Solutions, Testing, Business Analysis, Project Management, Mobile App Development, and User Experience Development. Calcey also have expertise in a wide range of development platforms like .NET, DotNetNuke, iOS, Python, PHP, Android and other popular mobile and Cloud technologies. Calcey engaged in a significant capacity expansion drive in 2011 by hiring over 20 engineers and acquiring five new clients, inclusive of big names like The Society for Information Display and Stanford Business School.

“I believe we are a truly innovative company in comparison with most other offshore development companies. We have dared to be different by investing some of our profits to incubate Products and spin-off new ventures, harnessing the creativity and ingenuity of our own staff. Our first product is already online at Xaffo.com, and is a foray into the rapidly expanding space of Social Media Intelligence. We hope to do what Google Analytics does for Websites, but this time with a Social Media angle to the metrics provided. Its early days for Xaffo, and we are keeping our fingers crossed,” said Mangala.

Ruwan Rajapakse, VP Professional Services at Calcey, says that one major contributory factor for their success over the years is the absence of heavy process and humbug. “We follow a lean and collaborative project management paradigm for engaging our clients, in true agile spirit. We keep paperwork and process to a minimum, and use prototyping extensively. It has saved time and helped avoided conflict with the client. We have invested in the right collaboration tools for the job, like a simple enterprise backlog, and we use these tools extensively. I have seen some software companies spend vast amounts of time and money on adhering to complex “processes” involving lots of document templates and statutory obligations, processes that sometimes drag down the projects with them. We do the bare essentials, and get by famously with our clients. The reality is, its better to invest in right hiring and good training, rather than in process adherence,” said Ruwan.

Calcey plans to celebrate its 10^th anniversary of business by organizing an inter-university “hackathon” or programming competition. Mangala says “we will of course have a big party and felicitate our staff and those who helped us, but we also want to do something to impact the new generation of undergraduates who have aspirations to become top-class software engineers; hence the idea of a hackathon.” Undergraduates in software engineering will have something to look forward to in May this year.

Over the years, Calcey Technologies has donated equipment for two IT centers in Matara and Neluwa to help the needy. Mangala is also a Director of FARO, a nonprofit organization, which actively assists rural youth in Sri Lanka to find sustainable employment and career opportunities in the Business Process Outsourcing industry.

The exact use case was to transfer the Product Line Items in the Contracts created on Salesforce, to separate JIRA Tasks, in near real-time. There was a field mapping that was required between the two systems, and the acknowledgement of a task’s closure from the JIRA end.

After a bit of background research, we decided to asynchronously sync the necessary data between the two platforms using a custom-coded agent running as a Windows Service. Coded using .NET’s WCF, this service pulls the Salesforce contract line items every five minutes, tags them to the correct JIRA users, and opens new JIRA tasks. The JIRA fields are populated according to a configurable XML-based field mapping. The communication between the syncing agent and the two platforms was via their respective SOAP interfaces. Shown below is a simple block diagram of what we did:

Complexities that we encountered included the design of a fail-safe mechanism to ensure that communication failure during any given run of the sync agent would be handled gracefully, and that the data transfer would resume from the last successfully transferred JIRA task. We also built a simple transaction log file to report any failures in the sync agent over time.

If you are ever faced with the problem of integrating Salesforce with JIRA, you might find the links below useful reference.

1. JIRA: https://developer.atlassian.com/display/JIRADEV/JIRA+RPC+Services

2. Salesforce: http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/api/index.htm

CN was in need of a feature-rich Article Management System, a Newsletter Management System and an advanced Product Directory. More importantly, they needed a single platform that can house all of their product-vertical Websites like DentalCompare and OpthalmologyWeb, which would in turn make it easier to introduce new features and maintain these Websites. We had developed an all-new vertical management platform for them to address these needs back in 2010, leveraging best of breed open source frameworks like JQuery, RabbitMQ and Memcached, and had successfully migrated several of CN’s smaller online marketplaces to this platform. DentalCompare was our first biggie, in terms of data volume, feature-extensions and scalability demands.

Whilst Calcey had extensive experience in dynamic website development, transferring huge amounts of data proved to be a relatively new challenge for us. There were many thousand records residing on different databases that needed to be transferred to the new site.  Our task was to obtain the data from multiple data sources, cleanse and load the data into the new unified data store. Ensuring data integrity, making sense of the old data formats and transforming these into a format that is meaningful to the new platform were some of the technical challenges that we faced. After looking into many options, we decided to overcome these challenges with SQL Server Integration Services, which made the job less time consuming and more efficient. This project became an opportunity to learn how to migrate a massive bulk of data from a legacy system into a new platform within a tight deadline.

“We started on a solid architectural foundation based on the Microsoft technology stack, and adopted a “living architecture” that got refactored down the road when needed” says Chamindu, our team’s Software Architect. Dhanushka, our Lead Engineer driving the technical solution, says: “we employed all the good practices we had learnt over the years, ranging from Daily Code Check-in through Continuous Integration to Unit Test Driven Development. We setup an automated Selenium Test suite to minimize manual regression testing. We maintained strict programmer discipline throughout the development cycles, employing pair programming and daily code reviews. There were a few tough days when we had to work extra hours, but the awesome end result was well worth the trouble!”

As the appointed Project Manager with a team of 16 engineers, personally I found this project to be an exciting challenge dealing with many unknowns at the beginning. Since this was the first of many large-scale Website migration projects to come, I found that capturing all the potential future requirements from the stakeholders upfront was particularly difficult. So we decided to follow Scrum methodology and managed the workload in fortnightly Sprints. Each Sprint was focused on achieving the immediate known requirements at hand and rigorously tested to ensure quality. Daily stand-up meetings with the team and biweekly Sprint Planning with CompareNetworks ensured that we were on the right course. We managed our tasks on JIRA, a popular enterprise project backlog. The Agile development philosophy proved to be a gem in delivering this baby.

We uploaded the completed DentalCompare Website to a staging environment one week prior to the Live release date, for final feedback by CN stakeholders. We also configured an offline production release to ensure there will be no delay in going Live. On the big day, we ran a “War Room” for 48 hours to continuously monitor the new Website’s performance and to handle any potential issues. We took shifts staying up overnight on standby for defect fixes. In the end, there were only a few minor configuration parameters to be changed during the War Room, and the Website was rocking on Live!

The project was a fun and rewarding experience for all of us at Calcey, and it helped CompareNetworks to take their business to new heights. Besides, CN and Calcey jointly rewarded all of us who contributed to this project with a 3-day vacation at Habarana Lodge, all expenses paid. It was one awesome project.  Best of all, we reused the methodology that we perfected in this project to migrate yet another of CN’s verticals, OpthalmologyWeb, successfully into the new vertical management platform in late 2011.