Client Stories > Business & professional services > Word360
Word360 provide interpretation and translation services in over 300 languages and dialects through a global network of linguists. Their services range from telephone interpreting to document translation and in recent years have focused on the health and social care sectors. Their head offices are in Birmingham, with centers throughout the region.
The company started as a small language service company until it was taken over by a husband-and-wife team: Tiku and Kavita, who understood that the secret to success was good customer service, competitive pricing, and excellent technology. For the first few years of their stewardship, they engaged a Romanian company to develop the software through a needs approach. This meant development was a mix of code and functionality that over time created issues with performance and scalability as the system struggled with the company’s rapid growth. Realising they needed help with the development of their software, Word360 contacted Freeman Clarke for guidance and support to help re-design their systems.
An initial review uncovered a few key issues and a need to replace the entire system by building version 2 of the software. Considering the new innovation and functionality that the Directors wanted to introduce into the new system, a microservice architecture was proposed. Whilst this posed a higher initial outlay of costs, this would allow each key function to be monitored separately, upgraded, or replaced without affecting the rest of the system’s functionality. It would also provide the scalability and maintainability that Word360 were looking for.
During the process of initiating the project, the COVID pandemic changed the requirements of Word360’s clients, placing greater reliance on the digital services such as telephone and video interpreting which put an increased strain on v1 of the software. By identifying new functionality in the base technologies, they were able to increase the capacity of the system over the short term.
Freeman Clarke has not only led the specification of requirements, identified companies to help design the UX and UI but also helped build the team, and develop the overall business strategy for the company.
COO Kavita Parmar said:
‘Richard has been a fantastic CTO in helping us to find the right team to build the next generation of our software. His financial and strategic acumen has been invaluable in steering our business away from the common pitfalls of new technology builds and managing our budget to create a system within budget.’
Freeman Clarke is the largest and most experienced team of fractional IT leaders. We work exclusively with ambitious organisations, helping our clients use IT to beat the competition and grow. Contact us and we’ll be in touch for an informal conversation
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Graeme Freeman
Co-Founder and Director