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The product transformed the way Spotlight does business, quickly becoming the primary way employees do their work and communicate with clients and providing valuable insights, thanks to visibility of data across multiple clients.

Managing data to improve client outcomes

OPPORTUNITY

For a technology company, maintaining a working relationship with industry analysts who recommend products to large companies is an important piece of the marketing puzzle. Spotlight Analyst Relations helps technology companies get the most out of those analyst relationships through coaching, managing the logistics of the relationship, and refining a company’s messaging.

Managing all of those data and workflows is a monumental task on its own and Spotlight quickly outgrew its fragmented system composed of off-the-shelf software and spreadsheets. The company needed a more efficient system to support the entire organization and enable future growth. Spotlight decided to create a custom software platform to streamline tracking and reporting of the analyst interaction and planning process. Knowing he needed more than just development capabilities, Spotlight CEO Andrew Hsu turned to 27Global.

“We looked to 27Global for leadership, help thinking through the problem, for wisdom – how to pick the different technologies – and competence and development. We needed them to do the hard work.”

-Andrew Hsu, CEO, Spotlight Analyst Relations

Spotlight knew that if the tool generated enough revenue, the company would eventually hire its own developers, but first it needed 27Global’s knowledge, perspective and ability to create the product.

Solution

The primary goal of creating a new system for Spotlight was to create a tool that allows the company to do effective and efficient work. However, to recoup some of the costs involved in creating the new system and to take advantage of a market opportunity, Spotlight also wanted to be able to market the tool to other companies.

27Global and Spotlight worked together over a period of years to create a data management system that allows Spotlight to better collaborate internally as well as with clients and analysts.

27Global built a Full Stack JavaScript application using Node.js on the back end and Angular on the front end. The cloud-based application is fully hosted at Amazon AWS, using Amazon RDS for data storage and a containerized micro-services application tier managed by AWS Elastic Container Service.

Spotlight’s reporting process became much more automated, and the simplified user interface allows its employees to rapidly access real-time data, as well as review outcomes and historical data over time.

Even though the major development work on the new product is complete, 27Global still plays an ongoing role in management of the application.

“They are still our primary partner when it comes to infrastructure,” Hsu said. 27Global deals with the hosting and security features as well as sharing historical knowledge of how the tool was developed with Spotlight’s new in-house development team.

Results

Hsu says the resulting product has been “transformative” for the way Spotlight does business, quickly becoming the primary way employees do their work and communicate with clients. Not just that, but Hsu said the tool provided surprising insights: “Now that we have everything in one system, we’re learning new things. It’s actually changing the way we work. It’s giving us perspective into what works and what doesn’t work for our clients because we can see data across multiple clients.”

The new tool’s advantages don’t stop there. As planned, Spotlight launched the product into the market in September, where it has garnered interest from both small and large technology companies. In the future, Hsu has plans for an autonomous arm of Spotlight to develop and market the product.

“The tool has surprised us. Now that we have everything in one system, we’re learning new things. It’s actually changing the way that we work.”

-Andrew Hsu, CEO, Spotlight Analyst Relations

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