Written by: Tristan Louis, President & CEO, Casebook PBC
A new decade is starting, which is a good time for us all to reflect on the world we had a decade ago and the world we will have a decade from now. The iPad, streaming services like Netflix, on-demand services like Uber, drones, and AIs like Siri and Alexa, all things that did not exist at the dawn of the last decade, but are now deeply embedded into our culture.
In such a dynamic environment, I am often asked how we build for the future. Casebook tends to stay on top of the significant trends and deliver software that seems either the right thing at the right time or feels ahead of the rest of the world. To do so, we had to think through every facet of our business, and configure an organization that ensures our customers are always on the cutting edge of progress in human services. So today I’d like to say a few words about our technology, something we don’t always bring front and center when we talk to customers.
Because the pace of technology accelerates with every passing decade, building for flexibility is key to building long term solutions. With as broad a mission as helping the front-line protect the most vulnerable members of society through software, we have been forced to think through that flexibility. Internally, this has taken the shape of a microservices architectures based on Kubernetes and exposed to the outside world through open APIs using a modern design system.
Kubernetes is a container technology that allows us to build software that is self-healing and self-growing: what this means is that we ensure high levels of redundancy across every aspect of our security and quality management so that customers can safely run their operations without having to worry about the impact of new deployments or external hackers. Our systems stay up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no matter what. Thanks to this, we’ve had military experts test our security and fail at achieving any critical impact.
Microservices are the type of software architecture the new world is built on. By breaking applications down to simple, highly maintainable and testable services, this type of architecture is giving us the greatest flexibility to adapt to any future technology requirements. This approach, which is the one taken by the likes of Netflix, Amazon, Uber, and many others, represents a considerable change to the way software is built and allows us to develop at a much faster pace without interrupting the existing functionality of applications while they are running. Because each discreet service is right-sized, it can be distributed across a variety of platforms, whether it is through a web browser, mobile device, audio channel, or bot service. I suspect that the next decade will bring new forms of interactions in human services through augmented reality and virtual reality, and our software will be there with you when those new distribution channels achieve greater maturity.
In today’s world, thinking through modern applications also means thinking through the interaction users have with the applications. But as you know, the interaction you have with a mobile device is different from the interaction you have with a computer or tablet. We call each of those channels. To ensure the best experience across all channels and drive consistency across business apps and channels, we have created a Design System, ensuring a consistent user experience on all of our applications. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft follow this model to ensure consistency across different channels. The Casebook Design System allows for our applications to evolve and incorporate the latest design trends into our offerings, ensuring that you will always get the best experience with our software.
We live in an increasingly connected world and software like ours doesn’t operate in a bubble, and as such we have a set of open APIs, which can be used to lower the disruption and cost of integration. We’ve made connecting Casebook apps with your other systems seamless. These open APIs allow software developers to create added solutions on top of our systems. We expect to make more announcements around this in the future, as our offerings grow, and third parties start offering new apps that leverage these APIs.
We’ve focused on ensuring that our technology does not stand in the way of your future. We are looking forward to future collaborations in this new decade.
