Oasis Senior Advisor is a company that offers housing assistance in finding a place for aging people. At Oasis Senior Advisors®, they are committed to simplifying the process of selecting a senior housing community. They proudly offer free senior housing services for individuals across the country. For that purpose, they use their custom-developed software OasisIQ™ platform, which collects information about a person’s lifestyle, finances, and other factors in one personal account and then automatically finds the perfect option for each person/family.
The Challenge
A free, community-based referral service, Oasis Senior Advisors (OSA) combines its consultants’ local knowledge with its proprietary OasisIQ™ software to examine an elderly client’s lifestyle, finances, health, and other factors and uses that data to help them or their loved ones find the retirement residence that will best meet their needs. However, while the OasisIQ software is a powerful competitive differentiator, the understaffed OSA IT team was struggling to keep up with needed enhancements, much less address typical bugs. Another complicating factor was that OasisIQ was hosted on-premises, in a local data center, that provided minimum support. It offered no redundancy, monitoring, and no ability to scale cost-effectively.
The challenge was to modernize the OasisIQ infrastructure and software, transition to a Cloud environment and maximize DevOps processes, in order to provide needed support to the existing IT department, with the ultimate goal to develop a stable, modern hosting platform. An added complexity was the close integration of OasisIQ with Microsoft Exchange and their calendar. As part of its franchise offering Oasis provides email and calendar services to their franchisees. This required any system upgrade and conversion to be done in such a way as to minimize to time the system would be unavailable to users and most importantly, to ensure that franchises would not miss or lose any emails or appointments.
The Solution
Oasis used the Sirma team to help them with our IT consulting services to create the perfect NextGen Cloud Application for them. So the application that Sirma created was designed to upgrade both the OasisIQ platform itself and OASIS’s development and support teams by:
Optimizing and refactoring the OasisIQ code to create a solid, scalable foundation that met industry standards and HIPAA compliance;
Transferring responsibility for platform stabilization and scalability from OSA to Sirma;
Putting together a dedicated IT team consisting of Sirma software engineers and core members of the client’s original IT team;
Moving OasisIQ from the data center to the Cloud, where OSA could take advantage of built-in redundancy, scalability, performance consistency, system monitoring, and enhanced cost controls;
The Result
OSA has been able to upgrade its operations on two fronts:
Working on a stable, powerful, scalable, easy-to-manage software platform that enables the company to live up to its consumer promise now hosted in the Azure Cloud;
Forming a robust IT team with the manpower and expertise to develop more powerful enhancements and features for the OASIS IQ platform;
Actually lowering the total number of full-time software and IT staff required to support the project (across both the OASIS and Sirma teams)
