Strategic e

commerce acquisition and integration

Overview

CLIENT E-commerce INDUSTRY Apparel & Clothing SERVICE Technical Due Diligence

About the client

Our clients, one of the leading healthcare apparel and footwear companies and, on the other side, an innovative manufacturer/distributor of school uniforms, and corporate identity uniforms in the US.

Both companies approached us with the request to conduct a technical due diligence assessment of a target company they were considering to acquire, a B2B & B2C eCommerce platform.

The Challenge & Scope of Work

Even though our client had a preexisting relationship with the target company, they wanted to ensure that post acquisition they are able to integrate easily with the platform and that the platform is scalable enough to achieve growth targets without requiring material investment.

The Sphere team identified 4 key work streams for this assessment.

Architecture and code assessment

The buyer wanted to assess whether architecture and design of the platform are aligned with best practices, including documentation.

Performance and scalability

Identify whether there are any scalability bottlenecks and hardware dependencies that will require further investment in the future.

New client onboarding

How automated the new client onboarding is. The buyer wanted to understand whether there are any synergies with their current client onboarding process, and whether post acquisition they can expect to realize cost savings.

Infrastructure and cloud

Hosting design and implementation of best practices.

The Outcome

Sphere’s review showed that the target does not have very high standards for software development processes in comparison to market standard. The infrastructure and design were derived from the pre-cloud time and mostly followed the design decisions made at that time.

Technical Due Diligence confirmed that the platform can handle the current number of clients and with manual efforts it could scale to some degree. We confirmed that the client onboarding process is automated, however, the general level of technological automation was low.

Key Achievements

We identified a large amount of material improvement opportunities related to code quality. Sphere’s team has also assessed that the buyer will require a team of at least 20 FTEs.

We also identified that the system architecture and design approaches are not cloud-native. Correcting this would also require a material investment in additional headcount.

Through the Due Diligence process we revealed several high severity security vulnerabilities and one critical vulnerability, all requiring immediate attention post acquisition.

Takeaways

• Our client decided to not go ahead with the acquisition, due to material findings outlined in the TDD report.

• We identified that the second platform required major improvements and they decided to continue a partnership with the target instead while trying to build an in house distribution platform.

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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