MKG Recruits Sphere

Optimized Event-Management Platform for Medical Knowledge Group

Client: Medical Knowledge Group (MKG)
Industry: Pharmaceutical Marketing
Service: Code Refactoring & Modernization|Python Migration|jQuery → React Migration|Performance & Reliability Engineering

Overview

Since 2004, Medical Knowledge Group (MKG), LLC has focused on building brand equity for many of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies. Through multi-channel marketing solutions, network mapping analytics, and patient-finding analytics, MKG enables intelligent data insights for physicians and other health-care professionals.

To reach the pharmaceutical market, MKG organizes and promotes medical conferences, gathering data on attendees, registrations, and activity for targeted advertising. iPad check-in and an iOS attendee-tracking app feed an internal, custom-built web-based event-management system that handles scheduling, billing, registration, sponsors, calendars, third-party vendors, PDF documents — and is customizable per conference with its own landing page.

What Was Slowing the Platform Down

Outdated Programming Languages

The system had drifted off mainstream tooling — outdated languages and frameworks made every change risky and every fix slower than it should be.

Bugs and Data Duplication

Years of patches without engineering best practices accumulated into a long tail of bugs and duplicate data across the registration flow.

Two-Minute Page Loads

Load times had ballooned to as much as two minutes — turning conference registration into a frustration for attendees and a credibility risk for MKG.

How We Solved It

MKG recruited Sphere Software to revamp the system. After evaluation, Sphere proposed three concrete moves and executed them in parallel — refactor the existing code base, debug the registration issues, and re-base the platform on engineering best practices.

1. Refactor and Modernize
Sphere migrated the application toward Python and from jQuery to React, optimizing the system for a better internal user experience. Code was refactored into a basic functionality package containing the essentials for conference tracking — clean, current, and easier to evolve.
2. Modular Campaign Customizations
Campaign customizations were stored in a separate repository from the mime module, so conference tracking could be upgraded independently and remain easy to support and modify in the future.
3. Debug Registration End-to-End
Several bugs in the conference signup and attendance flow were fixed. The two-minute load times dropped to seconds — a seamless experience for attendees and accurate data extraction back into the event system.

Key Outcomes

Load Times: 2 Min → Seconds

Excessive load times of up to two minutes were reduced to seconds after debugging — turning the worst part of the experience into the smoothest.

Operational Efficiency

"Because of Sphere, we’re now much more operationally efficient," said SVP of Digital Technology Tom Iannucci.

Future-Proof Architecture

Modular structure means upcoming campaigns and conferences can be customized without destabilizing core conference tracking.

Timely, Quality Delivery

"We were most impressed with Sphere’s timely delivery and quality of work. I would recommend them in a heartbeat." — Tom Iannucci.

The Results

Sphere refactored all code, fixed the highest-impact bugs in conference registration, and dropped load times from up to two minutes to seconds — a seamless experience for attendees and accurate data extraction back into the web-based event system. Sphere also went the extra mile by customizing event systems and associated landing pages and promotional websites for MKG’s upcoming events.

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Hear from our clients

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors

Our experience with Sphere and their team has been and continues to be fantastic. We keep throwing new projects at them, and they keep knocking them out of the park (including the rescue of a project that was previously bungled by another vendor).

Ben Crawford

Senior Product Manager at Enova Financial

I would expect to be delighted. It's been a really positive experience, working with Sphere, and I would expect you to have the same.

Mark Friedgan

CEO at CreditNinja

Sphere consistently prioritizes the needs of their clients, demonstrating both agility and teamwork. As an offshore team, they have been an integral part of our organization and we plan to continue growing with them.

René Pfitzner

Co-Founder at Experify

Sphere provided excellent full-stack development manpower to augment our team and help push our product forward. They are easy to work with, tech-savvy and proactive.

Bruce Burdick

Chief Information Officer at Integra Credit

We've been working with Sphere and its excellent consultants since our founding. I've found that they are true partners in the success of our business.

Jemal Swoboda

CEO at Dabble

The resources and developers that Sphere Software provides are skilled and have the required technical expertise, but more importantly, they have helped us build a culture of excellence within our team.

Arthur Tretyak

Founder and CEO at IntegraCredit

With Sphere, we were able to migrate in half the time it would take to train an additional FTE… and for a fraction of the cost. Our experience with Sphere has been exceptional.

Lee Ebreo

VP of Engineering at Credit Ninja

These things would not have been achievable if we did not build our own in-house system and if we did not partner with Sphere to help us achieve our goals.

Selah Ben-Haim

VP of Engineering at Prominence Advisors