Xello

Enhancing Student Planning Tools with Technology

Xello, which builds software to prepare students for college and careers, needed a new product launched by September but lacked the internal capacity to build it. Ollon built the product from scratch, backend and frontend, and delivered it on schedule. Impressed with the results, Xello has since expanded the partnership to six completed projects over three years.

Situation

Xello, which creates software to prepare students for college and careers, faced a challenging timeline for a product launch scheduled for back to school in September. Their existing team was fully engaged in other projects, so they lacked the resources to meet the deadline and reached out to Ollon for support.

Solution

Ollon provided three additional developers to support Xello with the new product launch, which would enable students to plan their future with state specific data on salary, wages, and cost of living. The developers created the new product from scratch, managing both backend and frontend development, ensuring seamless integration with Xello’s existing infrastructure. Additionally, they enhanced code practices by using more modern platforms while maintaining and respecting the standards defined by Xello.

Results

Impressed with Ollon's expertise and collaborative approach, Xello engaged them for the development of another new product, which has recently launched. Xello continues to work with Ollon on further projects, demonstrating their continued satisfaction with the partnership, going so far as to say Ollon’s team has, “been wonderful to work with and make up one of the best development teams I've ever had the pleasure to work with.”

Technologies

AngularJS, C#, .NET Core

Our Expertise in Action

.NET application development

Xello operates a microservice-based .NET application running in Docker containers on Azure cloud infrastructure. As a leader in the education technology space, Xello maintains a high-performing engineering team of approximately 70 developers. Ollon's development team has consistently delivered critical features within tight deadlines.

Cloud Infrastructure Migration

One Xello project involved migrating an acquired UK company's complex legacy infrastructure of 40+ on-premises servers to Azure cloud storage. The migration consolidated disparate systems into a streamlined cloud-based architecture, transitioning from outdated hardware to modern cloud services. This infrastructure overhaul reduced Xello's monthly operational costs from $10,000 to $2,000, achieving $8,000 in monthly savings within just over three months of completion.

Team augmentation and staff scaling

Xello's existing engineering team was fully committed to other work when a hard deadline for a back to school product launch came up, leaving no internal capacity to build the new product in time. Ollon added several developers to cover that gap for an initial engagement built around the launch deadline. Xello expanded the partnership over time, growing the augmented team to six developers and a QA specialist for ongoing work, including seasonal capacity increases ahead of each August release and coverage during staff transitions such as parental leave. That staffing has continued for more than three years across six separate projects.

Microservices architecture

Xello's platform is built as a set of independent services, spanning both a microservice based .NET backend and a micro frontend on the client side, not a single monolithic application. Ollon supported both layers, setting up and later maintaining the micro frontend's deployment and local testing configuration, and building out backend features such as expense tracking, family information, and education data as their own API services with dedicated data layers. Development container work using Docker helped keep environments consistent as the number of independent services grew. That structure let Xello's team update and deploy individual pieces of the platform separately instead of coordinating changes across one large codebase.