Aptumo

Background

Echo envisioned an easy-to-use, cloud-native solution, designed to transform how utility companies manage billing in the era of connected customers.

That’s how Aptumo was born: an innovative SaaS customer billing solution, built by Echo on Salesforce, to enable utility companies to make billing easy, and to reduce billing and CRM data synchronisation headaches across customer service operations.

Problem and Challenges

Echo’s team is large and globally distributed, and it was crucial that the same security and technical standards were observed consistently throughout product development.

Successfully passing the AppExchange Security Review was vital to avoid delays to the Echo’s planned time-to-market, and this was adding additional pressure to the product development team.

In the meantime, customers from multiple geographies were buying into Echo’s vision and new regulatory requirements continued to emerge that needed to be built into the product quickly: in simple words, development could not be stopped.

Echo needed a way to deliver innovation quickly while ensuring top-class security standards were always met, enabling them to clear the AppExchange Security Review in line with their planned timeline.

Solution

Clayton’s software helped Echo pass the AppExchange Security Review and to meet their time-to-market goals, thanks to a combination of continuous automated reviews, and one-off manual inspections.

Echo’s team runs its Salesforce development on GitHub, using Clayton’s solution to ensure all new developments are compliant with all AppExchange Security Requirements.

Echo’s team use a feature-branch git workflow. Every feature is developed on its own branch, and a pull request is created as soon as development is complete.

As soon as this happens, Clayton performs a complete security check, outlining any potential issues and recommending fixes to the Echo developers. Once all checks pass, a peer-to-peer review takes place and the feature is eventually merged, triggering the CI pipeline and automatic deployment to a testing environment.

Dedicated Success Plan

In addition this, Clayton provides periodic assessments and dedicated support by security experts, to help prepare all Security Review submissions.

Outcome

With a stronger cloud-first vision and more apps on the way, Echo has chosen Clayton as their on-going partner to support secure development across the Aptumo product.