nicos AG ensures the secure data communication of globally operating medium-sized companies with their international locations and production sites.
Optimization of customer communication by using the Structr platform
Structr Use Case
nicos AG ensures the secure data communication of globally operating medium-sized companies with their international locations and production sites.
It connects these via data networks (Wide Area Networks) and ensures a reliable, high-performance IT infrastructure as well as protected collaboration.
The nicos group consists of five companies, which are thematically specialized and globally present on three continents. The nicos AG, headquartered in Münster/Westphalia, offers all services from design and implementation to 24/7 operation of secure, global data networks. It is supported by the competent specialists of its subsidiaries woyn in the Philippines and nicos Australia.
Key Highlights
In order to offer customers the best possible protection against threats from the Internet and cyberattacks, the services of the nicos Service Operation Center are complemented by the Cyber Defense Center with the specialists of the subsidiary nicos cyber defense. Researching and developing new possibilities for intelligent communication channels is the focus of nicos Research & Development.
The company now has more than 4,000 network solutions in operation at over 2,000 sites in 130 countries
Key Highlights
A company’s customer portal is the digital gateway to its customers. It optimizes the customer relationship and creates the possibility of a fast exchange of information and documents.
What in the past could only be solved either by sending an e-mail to support services or by picking up the phone, combined with the ubiquitous waiting loop, is now, in the age of digital customer portals and self-service options, handled simply, promptly and without any help from customer service staff by the customers themselves via the
corresponding software.
In the customer portal, they can call up information and status details at any time – in the best case intuitively, interactively, customer-centric. Customer portals thus offer two decisive advantages: they relieve support teams of
work and offer customers a smoother, more pleasant support experience. In times of increasing market dynamics due to globalization and digitization, modern IT systems are therefore becoming a weighty differentiator.
For many companies, however, such modern, interactive portals are still a pie in the sky. This is mostly due to the many legacy systems or monolithic applications that have grown up over the years and stand in the way of companies’ structural future viability. These integrated and extensive systems often prove to be resistant to change or can only be adapted in a very time-consuming and cost-intensive manner. On the customer side, changes in legacy systems are often imperceptible and therefore do not provide a true customer experience. New requirements, such as real-time processing, relocation to the cloud, or new interfaces to other enterprise systems are often not even feasible.
These are issues that nicos AG has also been confronted with. Thus, in the 20 years that nicos has been ensuring that data networks function securely on a global scale, a customer system has also grown along with it, whose applications were programmed in different languages, optimized for platforms of all kinds and connected to each other via sometimes provisional detours. In the end, the legacy infrastructure was anything but agile and also involved a great deal of effort for maintenance and operation.
nicos AG decided against changing the existing legacy system and in favor of a modern solution with the best possible transparency for customers. For example, customers should be able to track at any time what the current status of their network is and what steps nicos AG is taking to solve any existing problems, get an overview of the sites and their service operations, service quality, bandwidth utilization or site incidences. Everything had to be intuitively usable, visually appealing, simple and straightforward.
Elementarily important for nicos AG was a fast implementation that ensured that the system was not already outdated again at the time of implementation, as would have been expected with a waterfall solution with the corresponding time expenditure in advance. Thus, the decision was made in favor of a new, solid foundation and a fast,
future-proof solution from Structr. Last but not least, the convincing combination and close coupling of middleware functionality and modern, secure web stack offered by Structr was also decisive.
The existing customer portal at nicos based on Typo3 CMS was a conglomerate of different data sources, data logics and visualization approaches.
The replacement of the portal by a Structr solution and the simplification of the interconnections is enormously supported by the feature variety of Structr.
Functional parts of the in-house development to be replaced were already included in Structr’s scope of delivery and no longer had to be developed in-house for the specific customer solution in an intensive manner, but only had to be configured.
Through various features, Structr was able to add another strength, namely its perfect suitability as a link between systems.
In addition, a modern utility-first CSS framework (Tailwind CSS) is used, which can be optimally integrated by Structr and allows the creation of modern, responsive application interfaces in a simple way. The use of the component library with ready-made visualization elements also saves a lot of time.
In the nicos customer portal, for example, an easy-to-understand data visualization will be made available for the user in the future by means of a connection to an external charting tool.
Currently, there is already a clear, modern overview of all locations, their service status and all operating parameters. In addition, maps have been integrated and a status traffic light system has been set up.
Due to the large amount of data and its interdependencies (network structures), the use of a graph database is exceptionally advantageous. This supports Structr natively and handles this requirement directly and without additional work.
Test automation was also a priority for nicos AG. The use of automated tests within a test framework (Cypress) ensures that features are automatically tested with each new version and that existing functionalities are guaranteed.
Structr’s solution offers numerous functional extensions, technical improvements and usability optimizations. This enabled the developers of nicos AG to build a modern new customer portal in a short time, to integrate existing and new data sources, and also to implement future enhancements extremely quickly and without high development effort due to the flexibility.
The developers of nicos AG and Structr were in direct communication from the very beginning. Since both companies are oriented towards agile principles, a very homogeneous and efficient cooperation
developed very early on. With the support of a Structr developer on site, the user interfaces were quickly created and a first prototype for the problem solution for nicos AG was developed within a few
days.
The first version with a limited feature set was ready just four weeks after project kick-off.
Testimonial nicos AG
The architecture we developed and built with Structr allowed us to proceed efficiently in the project: discussions did not revolve around the technical "how?" but about the customer-perceivable "what?"!
Results
Through the use of Structr, nicos AG is now able to access almost all of its existing customer data via the Structr infrastructure. By implementing Structr for the new customer portal, the part of the information that is relevant for customers can also be made directly, quickly and securely accessible to them on the Internet, anytime and anywhere.
The use of Structr on the Intranet and Internet enables much better use and linking of existing and new information. “We quickly saw initial productivity gains and a reduction in error rates. We were also able to significantly reduce development time by using Structr,” sums up Karsten Hecker, Head of Network Automation, nicos AG. The internal development team has a figure for this: “It’s at least a factor of 10 times faster!”.
Would you like to learn more about how Structr was used in this solution?
Testimonial nicos AG
If we had built this system ourselves, it would probably have taken us two years. Structr implemented the system according to our conception in four weeks!
Get in touch with Structr
We are interested in the use of Structr
I’m looking forward to your inquiry!
Axel Morgner
CEO & CTO
Call 0800-STRUCTR
+49 800 / 78 78 287
Advantages
Build individual software solutions in no timeFeature-rich applications in minutes with the flexibility and speed of Graph technology
Control complexity through graph technologyNo-compromise back-ends and front-ends optimized for each role
All-in-one software stack with all necessary toolsBuild real end-to-end solutions without any additional tools or services needed