- Case Study -

Supporting ACS growth with scalable technology solutions

Alterna Capital Solutions (ACS)

Alterna Capital Solutions designs flexible, high-quality working capital financing solutions tailored to each client’s goals. Solutions include invoice financing, asset-based lines of credit, term loans and complimentary financing solutions.

Alterna Capital Solutions (ACS) delivers working capital and financing (“factoring”) solutions to a variety of customers. ACS' continued growth calls for scalable technology solutions, including the ability to integrate systems seamlessly, generate meaningful reports, and provide exceptional customer support.

ACS appointed Mindex, an AWS Advanced Services Partner, to help migrate their critical operational system that processes and supports its factoring offerings to a self-hosted, managed Cloud via AWS.

Opportunity

Finding technology solutions to scale and support ACS' growth proved to be a challenge for the company. ACS needed a technology platform to facilitate operations, integrate seamlessly between existing systems, yield meaningful reports, and provide exceptional customer service.

ACS leveraged three (3) key systems as part of their enterprise technology architecture:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system

2. Operational system that processes and supports the company’s factoring offerings

3. Financial reporting and accounting software

Factoring System Challenges

While ACS's CRM and financial reporting and accounting software utilized API-based platforms, their factoring software lacked web services or API integration points. As a result, ACS could not integrate, report, and develop custom software functions (ex: a modern customer web portal).

Additionally, the previous software provider of ACS failed to enhance its factoring software to support custom client reports or system functions.

Solution

The developers of ACS' factoring software offer both dedicated, shared hosting and the option for software subscribers to host their own (self-hosted on-premise or in the customer's hosting environment, including the Cloud). Due to our software development and cloud solutions expertise, ACS engaged us to review different options for enhancing its operation factoring system.

Mindex determined that re-hosting/self-hosting their factoring software in a private, secure, and managed Cloud via AWS would allow ACS to implement value-add improvements to its platform. These improvements include system integrations between their CRM and financial and accounting software, combined reporting across systems, and unique customer-facing portals.

Implement AWS Cloud Architecture

Our cloud experts configured and deployed four (4) Windows servers to properly host ACS' factoring application components (Application, Engine, Web Server) and SQL Server database. Our team used ACS' factoring software's documentation to reference the varying specs (CPU, memory / RAM, disk space, etc.) for each Windows server.

We completed the following implementation:

Identity and Administration Management

Our team granted ACS and Mindex users access to the AWS account. Each user is associated with user roles and groups, providing access on a least privileged basis.

Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)

In order to firewall and secure access to the ACS Cloud, we created Virtual Private Clouds (VPC) through AWS CloudFormation.

ACS end-users and Mindex system administrators can access the environment securely (access to the environment is only enabled on an as-needed basis, limited to only secure/encrypted transmissions, and only open to appropriate ports and protocols as needed).

Server / Virtual Machine Administration

As part of the factoring software application and server installation, our team configured each of the Windows Servers, deployed as Virtual Machines (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud). This included the administration of the Windows EC2 Servers and ACS factoring database.

Learn more about Windows on AWS →

Remote Application Access (AppStream2.0):

We implemented AppStream2.0 to allow users to interface with the Cadence Application hosted on EC2. The AppStream service is set up to scale and meet the demands of the business.

Storage

ACS requires high availability of shared Windows file data. As a result, we implemented Windows FSX with Multi-AZ Architecture, providing ACS continuous data availability.

Successes

By migrating these services for ACS to a privately hosted AWS environment, we've positioned the ACS team to unlock value-add integrations, reporting, and custom software capabilities that will greatly contribute to the growth and needs of the business.

Our project achieved the following major successes for ACS:

Data Ownership

ACS has full ownership and access to their data and is no longer dependent on their previous software provider.

Custom Reports

Now that ACS hosts its database in AWS, it allows our team to run and download custom reports, providing fast and clean data access for their end users.

Scalable Solution

Our solution was flexible and scalable, a crucial need for ACS as it strives to achieve continued business growth.

Flexible Pricing Model

A flexible pricing model allows ACS to optimize costs and change infrastructure, including scaling up and down as needed.