As financial institutions strive to provide first-class service to their clients, the challenge may arise as to how they can proactively support the cross-cutting requirements of a rapidly evolving business, especially considering the varying use cases of internal stakeholders residing across distributed departments.

As a solution, rather than serving up a one-size-fits-all horizontal CRM that may require heavy customization post-purchase, NexJ Systems promotes a vertical customer relationship model that enables clients to pick and choose from the precise use case required to tackle their immediate strategic business initiatives.

In addition to this, the cloud applications team at NexJ Systems is pursuing a microservices transformation to further amplify the performance and flexibility benefits felt from the unique vertical CRM offering.

"Our team had measured our goals by delivery of additional features inside the CRM product. Now that we are decentralizing our product, we can assess our individual products and modules for sale along with the added benefits of moving to the cloud such as improved onboarding time, platform uptime, time to upgrade, and the overall satisfaction of our existing customers," said Owen Pond, Vice President of Software Development at NexJ Systems.

After carefully considering how to best extend continuous business value over time to its customers, the decision to pivot to a full-cloud offering for its suite of solutions became the clear and obvious move for NexJ Systems.

"NexJ started with large on-premise implementations. To support smaller clients on a managed cloud offering, our products needed to be even more API oriented and support more granular and independent deployments," said Pond. "We were feeling a lot of pain because customer customizations, along with required end-to-end deployments, created a high cost of upgrade for our clients."

In NexJ's evaluation of solutions to reduce technical debt as infrastructure complexity increased, Kong's service connectivity platform stood out as a compelling avenue to overcome some of the team's hurdles.

"Our customers have been asking us to provide modular features without having to upgrade core features, simplifying maintenance and reducing disruption," shared Pond. "Kong gives us a lot of flexibility to expose APIs in the current feature set and then replace them with a modular service down the road."

Just as NexJ Systems empowers clients to pinpoint their specific CRM use case and move swiftly towards achieving a desired business objective, the company similarly identified an opportunity to look internally and adopt an API-first mindset to help the organization move nimbly and accelerate its development release cycles.

"We had all the normal challenges of a company that was moving to the cloud and offering customers a SaaS product for the first time," said Pond. "From a development perspective, a lot of the tech debt we carried around was simply because our team didn't yet adopt an API-first mentality."

The cloud applications team also discovered new-found pockets of productivity from using Kong to set up test-driven workflows and further instill standardization across the development pipeline.

"Before using Kong, we had built an in-house gateway with Node, and it would take about 3-5 days to complete an API development cycle. With Kong integrated in with our NexJ pipeline and having the infrastructure and templating in place, it accelerated our entire process down to about 1-2 days and cut our API development time nearly in half. The API-first strategy we've adopted is resonating very well with prospects, legacy customers, and other important stakeholders," said Pond.

To reap the full benefits of moving to the cloud, NexJ Systems leveraged the Kong Gateway Enterprise API management platform to access existing back-end services and effectively transform them into reusable APIs, thus reducing time-to-value for customers while also setting the stage for a thriving ecosystem of third-party integrations.

"We really believe in the concept of integration," said Pond. "We're working on building out a partner ecosystem that will make it easy for third-party applications to play nicely with our infrastructure. All the while, the plan is to have this enabled by Kong, which is a huge success criteria for us being an API-first organization that is using an API gateway. "

In addition to constructing the framework to enhance its organization-wide API enablement and integration, NexJ Systems is actively implementing plans to further facilitate digital innovation, and Kong is at the forefront of the company's strong containerization strategy.

"We are now mature with Kubernetes and using Kong's Kubernetes Ingress Controller to support this," said Jelena Duma, principal application architect at NexJ Systems. "From API management to hardened security, routing, and service mesh, Kong offers us all of the precise features and configurable components that we need. For the most part, we have moved fully to the cloud, and our offering is now entirely managed by Kong."