SITUATION
With a technical lead based in New Zealand, the tyranny of distance (and time zones) familiar to dyed-in-the-wool Kiwis presented obstacles in working with remote teams. Recognising the availability of local talent in a burgeoning domestic technology industry, the vendor approached Assurity which set up a local team for the development of a connector for the AS2 protocol.
AS2 (Applicability Statement 2) is a specification for the transport of structured business-to-business data securely and reliably over the internet, using digital certificates and encryption. As the vendor is an integration software provider, this kind of functionality is essential to its core business.
Assurity’s Delivery Lead Shane Paulsen explains: “The connecter we worked on is the main access point for the vendor’s service bus; for businesses sending information, it acts as their gateway, offering a method for sending translatable, non-repudiable information. And, of course, the eventual product would have to be compatible with all the vendor’s products and any other components of the service bus it might incorporate after the fact.”
Under the guidance of the vendor’s technical lead, an Assurity team of four was established to develop the AS2 connector from scratch. The eventual product would replace a set of open source applications which the vendor had determined were no longer fit-for-purpose within its integration platform.