Software
Partners used to wait months for custom integrations. A versioned REST and GraphQL API, a developer portal and sandbox accounts now get them live in about two days.
The product had grown through acquisitions into more than 50 systems, from a 1990s AS/400 order module to modern .NET services. Every partner integration was a bespoke project run by the professional services team and took three to six months.
Rewriting the core was out of the question, so any API had to sit in front of the existing systems without changing their behaviour.
How things ran when we started, and once the work shipped.
Approach
4 phases over 6 months, with a working demo at the end of every week.
Weeks 1–4
Interviewed eight partners, designed a resource model for shipments, orders and tracking, and published an OpenAPI draft for feedback before writing code.
Weeks 4–14
Built adapters for each back-end system behind a Node.js API layer, with contract tests that run against recorded legacy responses on every build.
Weeks 10–20
Launched a portal with generated reference docs, SDKs for TypeScript and Python, self-serve API keys and sandbox tenants seeded with realistic data.
Weeks 18–26
Introduced dated API versions with a 12-month deprecation policy and moved the first 40 partners across with the client’s partner team.
A thin, well-tested API layer translates between a clean public contract and the legacy systems, so either side can change without breaking the other.
“Integrations used to be a cost centre with a waiting list. Now partners build against the sandbox on their own and we hear from them when they are ready to go live.”
Tell us where things stand today. On a 30-minute call an engineer will sketch how we would approach it, the timeline and a price range.