Swun Math pivots to distance learning with Pegasus One and a Microsoft .NET solution

Delivering custom solutions

Outsourcing software development can be terrifying for small and medium-sized businesses. Giving up control over processes, quality, and cost is a big deal: If things go wrong, a company’s reputation and competitive edge can suffer.

Pegasus One’s mission is to take the stress out of outsourcing software development, with a distinctive hybrid business model that simplifies the process. Founded in 2009, the software consulting and development firm specializes in custom artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and services for small and medium-sized businesses and the educational services sector.

“Our goal is to deliver the custom solutions and tools our clients need,” said Pegasus One CEO Tushar Puri. “We get them results quickly, efficiently, and painlessly, without uncertainty and out-of-control fees common to outsourcing.”

Pivoting for the pandemic

Swun Math needed to move all of its learning online because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and needed to do it quickly. The mathematics education provider required a highly interactive and engaging digital learning platform for elementary and middle school students that would support digital textbooks, collaboration, and real-time student assessments.

The company’s existing solution had been cobbled together using disparate technologies and platforms, making scalability impossible and management cumbersome.

“When the pandemic hit and we needed to pivot our delivery model fast, we quickly realized that our infrastructure simply wasn’t designed to withstand a big change,” said Si Swun, CEO of Swun Math. Swun knew that in order to achieve her learning delivery goals quickly, she needed expert help, so she turned to Pegasus One.

Scalability with Microsoft .NET

For more than a decade, Pegasus One has gained expertise in Microsoft technologies, such as .NET, SQL Server, and Azure. That experience made it obvious to choose a Microsoft technology stack to address Swun Math’s needs. Microsoft .NET provides full control over every aspect, enabling test-driven development, easy integration with other frameworks, application programming interfaces (APIs) based on representational state transfer (REST), and a lot more, which makes development faster, easier, and more predictable. Rapid application development enables Pegasus One to deliver minimum viable products within a matter of days, saving time and resources. Additionally, the stability and maturity of these technologies give Pegasus One confidence that they will deliver.

Pegasus One assessed Swun Math’s situation and recommended a solution built with Microsoft .NET tools, with a scalable, secure .NET stack and an SQL Server database. The new infrastructure provided flexible support for fast, easy single sign-on to major e-learning platforms such as ClassLink and Clever, with:

• Online learning with digital texts. The platform enabled Swun Math to build and publish proprietary math books online for teachers and students. Online books included features like highlighting, bookmarking, and adding custom notes for future reference.
  
  “Distance learning has made online access to math resources imperative, and e-books enrich the learning experience of our students,” said Kristina Scott, Project Manager at Swun Math. “The text-to-speech, notetaking, bookmarks, highlighting tool, dictionary, and interactive quizzes enhance and support learning, especially for students with special needs.”
  
  
• Improved student-teacher collaboration. Students and teachers gained the ability to interact and collaborate in real time, which gave students fast access to the resources they needed and offered support for both one-on-one and group meetings.
  
  
• Easier student assessments. Now it’s easy for Swun Math to build a wide array of student assessment types. These range from simple math problems and quizzes to complex visual word problems, and they are used to determine a student’s performance. The auto-scoring feature streamlines grading for teachers, freeing their time to invest in teaching and interaction with students.
  
  

“The Microsoft .NET and SQL Server-based solution that Pegasus One delivered addressed every challenge that our previous infrastructure presented,” said Eric Stano, Senior Engineer at Swun Math. “The ease of the single sign-on functionality alone has dramatically reduced the number of support calls we get for account-related issues.”

Improved security, performance, and disaster recovery

The newly developed Microsoft. NET and SQL Server-based application provided much-needed security, resiliency, scalability, and ease of maintenance. Managing a high volume of transactions and data became much easier with Microsoft SQL Server and enabled a faster and more robust disaster recovery process.

Through its data recovery and restoration features, Microsoft SQL Server eliminates the risk of losing data. Organizations can have peace of mind that data is secured through caching, log files, and frequent backups, no matter what may happen to the server.

Microsoft SQL Server uses policy-based management to detect security policies that are non-compliant. This feature allows only authorized personnel access to the database. Security audits and events can be written automatically to log files. The built-in transparent data compression feature along with encryption removes the need to programmatically do the same.

All these features and the comprehensive high-end capabilities of SQL Server lead to blazingly fast app performance and business intelligence without further optimization. 

SQL Server also allows for interactive, beautiful, and easy-to-read dashboards, providing administrators an easy, intelligent look at how people are using the platform.

Future-readiness with Microsoft and Pegasus One

The cross-platform nature of Microsoft. NET, along with the popularity and wide adoption of the framework, ensures long-term support and viability, which is a major consideration of choosing these technologies. The versatility and architecture of the platform means the solutions are extensible, scalable, and vastly supported.

The new scalable infrastructure has positioned Swun Math for growth and opportunity. It has improved application performance and adoption by more than 30 percent, reduced customer service calls, reduced downtime, and improved response to an outage by more than 50 percent. Swun Math estimates a cost savings of more than 37 percent over the next 12 months.