Inorganic growth and geographic expansion can quickly turn a once‑agile engineering organisation into a web of overlapping teams, duplicated roadmaps and rising run‑cost. A European network lifecycle automation provider was at this inflection point. With the mounting demand to accelerate innovation, R&D complexity increased proportionally.
It realized it had to simplify global R&D, modernize the core customer experience assurance platform, and create a scalable operating model that could support AI, data and SaaS growth, all without slowing releases or disrupting an existing global customer base.
Working with Persistent as its strategic engineering partner, the client treated the transformation not as a cost exercise, but as a business enablement program to strengthen delivery speed, improve platform resilience and build a cost base designed to scale.
Sprawled Teams and Platform Primed for Makeover
The client’s engineering teams were spread across more than nine locations in Europe, North America and Asia. Over time, that footprint introduced operational drag, leading to duplicated work, inconsistent execution rhythms and competing priorities that made it harder to move as one company.
At the same time, the client’s core customer experience assurance platform struggled to keep up performance metrics and needed infrastructure modernisation. The client turned to Persistent to improve speed and resilience while maintaining security and continuity for an established global customer base.
To deliver both simplification and modernisation in parallel, without compromising ongoing product delivery, Persistent stepped up to unify distributed teams, scale specialised talent quickly, and institutionalise a repeatable global delivery model.
Persistent had to address two material business constraints:
- Slower time‑to‑market: Misaligned priorities and distributed decision‑making extended delivery cycles, limiting the ability to ship new capabilities at the pace the market expected.
- Limited scalability for strategic growth: Without an integrated operating model, the client faced friction scaling global engineering talent, modernising critical platforms, and funding innovation while sustaining day‑to‑day delivery.
Scaling Engineering Delivery with Unified Model & Modernised Platform
We started by rationalising overlapping product lines and aligning teams to a single engineering vision and roadmap. In parallel, we executed a structured transition across regions and rapidly scaled capacity from 26 to more than 90 specialised engineers, creating a consistent execution rhythm across geographies.
A second workstream modernised the customer experience assurance platform. Refactoring and infrastructure modernisation improved performance and resiliency, while increasing operational flexibility for future releases and new service models.
Throughout the program, Persistent helped standardise engineering and operational processes, so modernisation work could run alongside active development with minimal disruption. Over time, Persistent became the client’s largest engineering partner, supporting continued modernisation and product innovation.
What changed in practice:
1. A unified global R&D model replaced fragmented regional execution.
- Overlaps and redundancies across product lines were identified and removed to reduce duplicated spend and engineering effort.
- A single engineering vision and roadmap aligned priorities across regions, shortening decision loops.
- Teams were integrated into cross‑functional delivery units, improving collaboration and consistency while reducing rework.
2. Standardized ways of working improved predictability, quality and release governance.
- Common workflows and quality practices reduced variability across teams and improved release confidence.
- A global delivery governance model clarified dependencies, ownership and execution cadence, thereby improving throughput across regions.
- Product, platform and operations teams were re‑aligned to reduce handoffs and accelerate delivery from build to run.
Platform Ready for What’s Next
Persistent delivered:
- Reduced run‑cost with clear cost visibility through consolidated global R&D operations
- Reduced organizational complexity by operating across fewer, more efficient engineering centers
- Improved platform performance and scalability through refactoring and infrastructure modernization
- Expanded delivery capacity by scaling specialized engineering teams from 26 to 90+ engineers
With a simplified R&D footprint and a modernised platform foundation, the client is positioned to accelerate its roadmap across AI, data and SaaS initiatives, improving speed to value while scaling engineering investment more efficiently.
Persistent established a long‑term strategic partnership valued at approximately $6M annually, providing sustained capacity for modernisation and innovation.
