DCASTech ASCEND
Challenge
DCASTechnologies is the premier provider of online lead generation and validation solutions in the consumer marketing & advertising space. At the dawn of Lead Generation / Co-Registration industry, the company founders identified a unique unaddressed opportunity for a reliable third party service that would centrally manage lead generation activities, as well as eliminate incomplete or inaccurate information collected through consumer-filled online forms. Such service would allow Advertisers and Marketers to differentiate themselves in a highly-competitive playground by the quality of their leads that would translate into increased conversion rates. The company turned to SSD to develop its flagship product ASCEND that was meant to be the leading solution for high-quality lead generation.
Result
Due to the highly-efficient software development lifecycle combined with the lowest Eastern European rates for sophisticated products of the enterprise-level quality, DCASTech was able to price ASCEND 60% less than comparable offerings of its competitors. The product was immediately embraced by customers such as MedTrackAlert, a renowned consumer health information company, and "IT Business Edge", a technology intelligence agent who works with 2,400+ technology publishers, vendors, and associations. The company remained profitable and growing regardless of the worst economic environment in years 2008-2009. DCASTech soon followed up with SSD to contract the development of its second product called APERTURE.
Action
Realizing that time-to-market and cost-effectiveness are paramount for the short-term success of any start-up, SSD applied outsourcing industry best practices to make sure the former is not attained at the expense of the long-term value of product quality:
- Assigned a dedicated project manager who worked diligently with the founders to translate business vision into technical architecture, and then prepare precise and comprehensive technical specification that the engineering team could implement right away.
- Instantly assembled an engineering team with the right skill-set from its existing pool of IT professionals with 5-10 years of experience in business intelligence, e-commerce, and online advertising space.
- Created clear project roadmap and schedule that took into account the possibility of frequent requirements changes, and included the list of all project threats and risks that SSD managers could foresee along the way.
- Set up clear communication procedures that included daily voice communication with DCASTech CTO, regular progress tracking and status reporting, as well as proactive inquiries from SSD engineers about unclear or imprecise aspects of the product to ensure the development was on the right track.
- Established the centralized repository for change request management to make sure every request made by the client and every bug found by the Quality Assurance team were taken care of in the order of its priority with respect to the available time and resources.
- Began systematic Quality Assurance early in the product development life-cycle to bring down the cost of issue resolution and to safeguard the product's early launch.
ASCEND Highlights
- Collects leads from any publisher or ad network.
- Allows for simple campaign set up to accept and centrally manage leads from multiple sources
- Consolidates, validates, de-dupes, deploys and passes data to the Advertiser in real-time
- Double-verifies the leads against 110mil proprietary household database
- Offers dedicated third party IP addresses to protect brand reputation with ISP’s
- Features:
- Auto-responders
- User friendly GUI allowing for flexible field creation and validation
- Intuitive dashboard to monitor all campaigns
- Permission based system access
- Warehouse for suppression files and creatives
- Comes in annual subscription for packages by:
- Leads Per Month
- Dedicated IPs
- White-listed Personal Domains
- Pro-Serv. Time per month
- Access to Personal Reports
- Auto-Responder Emails per lead
DCASTechnologies, CTO