The Challenges
A Pioneer in Engineering, Manufacturing, and Installing Fiber Optic network provider, our client, offers services that span across several markets, including Telco, Broadband and wireless, electricity utilities, OEM, Enterprise and Private Networks. Their product lines include loss test kits, optical time domain reflectometers (OTDRs), fiber identifiers, inspection and cleaning, fault locators and more.
The Company needed a solution which would simplify the field-testing process. They opted for a cloud-based mobility solution that would allow over 10,000 technicians to carry out tests of Fiber optic network to inspect and fix the issues in real-time. To start with, they developed an open and flexible modular test platform, which bifurcated software and hardware. Here, software refers to smart apps that control the hardware used for conducting tests. The technicians can snap-in the specific hardware to the carrier for conducting the corresponding optic test.
Now, they needed smart apps that would communicate with hardware to enable the technicians to conduct the tests. As each cable test requires a unique hardware module, the client needed a corresponding mobile app for it. The main challenge here was to develop multiple mobile apps for various hardware modules in a limited amount of time. In addition to this, each app was required to communicate with the hardware via Bluetooth and with cloud for data synchronization.
The Solution - Cross-platform Mobile apps
Xamarin.Forms, MVVM Light, Google MBaaS, Web API, SQLite DB, Cloud Storage And OBEX Protocol
Building an Enterprise Mobility solution needed rich Mobility expertise, along with experience with Hardware modules, Bluetooth stack & cross-platform Mobile app development framework using Xamarin forms. Saviant’s Xamarin development team built the app for Android and iOS platforms. As Xamarin.Forms in conjunction with the MVVM pattern provides up to 90 % of shared code across various platforms, we leveraged it to create a single re-usable code base. This shared unit was used for cross platform UI development with Xamarin Forms, where the apps are used for conducting various tests through respective hardware modules.