High Touch Technologies

Situation

High Touch Technologies, a provider of tailored software and technology solutions, had two cornerstone platforms that couldn’t stay where they were — and a leadership gap that made every estimate unreliable.

Nigel, its restaurant-management platform, carried a strict enterprise contract deadline, and the internal view had hardened into a frightening conclusion: meeting the requirements would take a complete rewrite of the backend. cynergi|suite, its rent-to-own platform, was deeply entrenched in COBOL, and the team’s plan was a big-bang replacement — two years of work with no one seeing any value until all of it was done.

When High Touch asked its cloud provider for an outside perspective, the provider vetted three premier partners. High Touch evaluated all three and chose us — on approach, on partnership, and on the way we laid out both the architectural evaluation and the augmentation behind it.

What we did

The evaluation came first: current architecture, future needs, and the question nobody inside could answer with confidence — does this actually require a rewrite? Our architects came back with a different answer on both platforms. Nigel didn’t need its backend torn out; it needed a hybrid replatform — Kubernetes for cloud scale with the offline capability restaurant operations demand, PostgreSQL underneath, real CI/CD throughout. And cynergi|suite didn’t need a big bang; there was a way to do it module by module, replacing legacy components gradually with zero downtime, so customers saw value release by release instead of waiting two years.

“When the answer came back — no, there is a way to do this module by module — that was a game changer. They were invaluable in helping us align on an architectural approach that broke through places we were blocked on both sides of the business.”

— Derrick Neilson, High Touch Technologies

From there, the people who did the architecture became the people who helped build it — augmentation following evaluation, with our team earning the trust of High Touch’s own engineers along the way. And when High Touch’s development leader resigned mid-engagement, we seated an interim CTO within days and a project manager to centralize communication with the end customer. Delivery didn’t pause.

Outcome

Nigel launched in its new hybrid model earlier than expected, positioned for rollout across thousands of restaurant locations. cynergi|suite’s modular migration shipped value release by release to the rent-to-own businesses that depend on it daily, rather than making them wait years for a big bang. Infrastructure costs dropped with the move off legacy hosting. And the modernization survived a leadership departure that would have stalled it a year earlier. We handed both platforms back to High Touch’s team on a foundation they could carry forward — which is how our engagements are supposed to end.

Derrick’s own summary of what the engagement actually was is the one we’d put on the wall:

“For a CEO who is non-technical, you brought a tech executive insight, capability, and process that solved a problem my tech people didn’t realize we had — or showed there were options they didn’t realize we had. You were that outsourced CTO presence. You brought a CTO process we didn’t have, it clarified things, it earned the trust of our technical team — and then the augmentation became natural.”

— Derrick Neilson, High Touch Technologies