Pole Star was finding it very difficult to innovate because tracking software developed many years ago was monolithic, difficult to maintain and almost impossible to change. I was appointed to recruit additional staff and deliver the new platform strategy at the same time as maintain product offerings in four different segments.
- Maritime segment – created and launched new platform to replace and improve legacy application
- Fisheries segment – created important new features and retired technical debt over a period of 18 months to bring the platform back to customers’ expectations. Agile development releases took place every month.
- Government segment – created new API to support a major contract with the US CoastGuard in August 2015 as well as maintaining a legacy platform. Also transitioned the largest government customer onto the Pole Star LRIT application.
- Financial Services – launched new software application in Feb 2013. created new features to secure new contracts and had started the process of integrating the product with the new Pole Star Platform
Pole Star Platform – Led the user design and creation of a new platform starting with mobile and creating a series of micro services to enable independent deployment of upgrades as well as integrate third party applications. These included new services including Ship Security Alert Management, Risk Insight, and Piracy Alerts for both mobile and desktop.
- Built an API at the same time to enable customers to integrate with their own ERP systems
- Recruited a new devops team to enable continuous deployment of software without downtime
- Built a much easier to use platform with higher security and capable of being deployed in both private and AWS cloud environments
The result was the creation of a unified piece of software that replaced a number of different tracking products, created a mobile application capability, and enabled faster delivery of new features to over 1200 commercial customers. Also created a new API capability which was valued by some sophisticated customers and designed to create new partnership opportunities.