The founding idea that Instant Access Technologies (IAT) had for epoints was simple: to build an online loyalty system with enough redeemable rewards to satisfy anyone. This vision, supplemented with great technology and quality software provided by PGS Software, has proved to be a winning combination. With nearly 2000 online stores and partners, 2 million rewards, and a variety of innovative and interactive ways to earn epoints, it has become one of the most powerful loyalty programs on the web. Thanks to the work of our software developers, IAT also owns a whole ecosystem that epoints is just a part of, including vast product databases, price comparison sites, recommendation engines, Big Data solutions and more.

1. www.pgs-soft.com©
The founding idea that Instant Access Technologies (IAT) had for epoints was simple: to
build an online loyalty system with enough redeemable rewards to satisfy anyone. This
vision, supplemented with great technology and quality software provided by PGS Software,
has proved to be a winning combination.
With nearly 2000 online stores and partners, 2 million rewards, and a variety of innovative
and interactive ways to earn epoints, it has become one of the most powerful loyalty
programs on the web. Thanks to the work of our software developers, IAT also owns a whole
ecosystem that epoints is just a part of, including vast product databases, price comparison
sites, recommendation engines, Big Data solutions and more.
epoints www.pgs-soft.comCase Study
1. CHALLENGES
The amount of software and service cross-dependencies made this one of most ambitious
projects in our history. The main challenges included:
CC Building an extensive ecosystem of over 30 web services, that could be used to deliver
various e-commerce products.
CC Creating an online loyalty program offering multiple ways to earn points and seamless
integration with a huge number of partner sites.
CC Solving Big Data related problems that included managing and analyzing a huge, distributed
and automatically synchronized product database and providing real-time search.
CC The scale of the datasets we worked with pushed us
to develop custom caching and indexing solutions.
CC Everything had to be extremely secure and robust.
Due to a large amount of valuable rewards, some users
quickly started looking for “epoint hacks”
CC Business requirements had to be rethought
and rewritten, to fully take advantage of available
technologies (for example: the product matching method).
CC Rapid scaling of the project required us to regularly introduce
new developers and testers to our team without
sacrificing quality or user experience.
01
Client’s Profile

2. www.pgs-soft.com© 02
2. PROCESS
Technologies
DynamoDB, Amazon AWS, Ja-
vaScript, MongoDB, Solr, Jenkins,
Node.js, Scala, Cucumber, Seleni-
um WebDriver, JMeter, Hibernate
MySQL, Backbone, Jasmine, Grunt,
JUnit, GitHub
Resources
8 developers, 5 testers, 2 graphic
designers, team leader
Duration
Started in October 2011, still
active
CC Early development: the project started with a team of four PGS Software developers.
They’ve built an engine that was driving the platform, based on Amazon Cloud. Then, they
started working on another basic piece of the puzzle: an admin module for managing data
from affiliate networks, including separate components for specific product providers.
CC Main functionalities: with core infrastructure in place, the team could move on to
build the actual epoints platform. It’s currently one of the most comprehensive reward
programs on the Web. Users receive points not only for buying specific goods, but also
for visiting sites, performing certain actions, writing product reviews, social activity... The
team put a lot of work into making epoints fast and secure, and integrate it with a long
list of partner sites and reward providers. PGS Software also created a cutting edge price
comparison engine and a Web store framework offered separately by IAT.
CC Other functionalities: other development tasks included a module for tracking
transactions via Refer ID, multiple web services that deliver the product data outside, and
a module that automatically creates AdWords campaigns based on recent sales figures.
In the end, our code repository included a network of 30 complex modules built with SOA
guidelines in mind.
CC Concept phase: it all started when IAT
CEO Matt Norbury secured funding for
a new online loyalty platform. There
was just one catch: he had one month
to find a team capable of creating it.
His CTO looked up various outsourcing
prospects and finally contacted PGS
Software. What helped him make up his
mind was the calm professionalism of
PGS Program Manager who responded
to the query in detail within half an
hour.
C Testing: a project of this scale with so many
real users and financial data involved called
for careful testing. Nearly half of the team
consists of QA experts. They play an important
role during each release, and perform a
comprehensive range of tests. To streamline
their work, we’ve created a fully automatic
development and testing environment with
1-click cloud deployment. It paid out – the
system offers a spotless user experience.
C Visual design: in the beginning our client employed
several consulting and design companies that researched
the market and produced drafts. But just a month away
from the planned release, we still had no implementable
designs. That’s when the client allowed our in-house
designers to step in and prepare something on their own.
Two of them quickly created a complete set of beautiful
front-end layouts, as well as multiple mobile components.
They’ve also built some universal designs for various sub-
brands.

3. Memorable moment:
the cooperation with IAT staff has been extremely close, and they visited our office on
several occasions. What we remember best from those trips, was the trouble some of them
had with airport security due to a… jar of traditional Polish pickled gherkins.
User benefits:
Nearly 2000 places to earn epoints
from
Over 2 million redeemable rewards
Daily deals and vouchers
Improved mobile experience
Gamification and social sharing
Tools to create own e-commerce sites
Automatically updated product infor-
mation
3. RESULT
Business and functional benefits:
A full ecosystem of e-commerce services
and solutions
Industry-leading online loyalty program
Secure and fast back-end and database
solutions
Deep integrations with third-party data pro-
viders
Highly automated development environment
Transparent code base and a fully modular
platform
Automated load balancing (deployed using
Amazon Web Services)
Summary
The fact that complexity increases vulnerability is
well known in the IT world. In this project, a team of
PGS Software developers has managed to stay on
top of the entire Web-based ecosystem with dozens
of separate services and modules, while providing
outstanding stability, performance and security. The
project also proves that we are able to tackle Big Data
related issues, and that our in-house graphic designers
can create work as good as dedicated design houses
(and often in a shorter time-frame). With plans to
double the team once again, and to bring the ePoints
ecosystem global, the partnership with IAT might be
one of the most important in PGS Software’s history.
CC About PGS Software: We are a Polish IT outsourcing company specialized in software development and
employing over 230 experienced engineers. Our job is to convert your ideas into real-life custom business
solutions unavailable with the off-the-shelf boxed products.
CC About the product: IAT (Instant Access Technologies Ltd.) is a UK-based company that offers innovative
products connecting brands and consumers. It’s main offer – the epoints platform – lets users earn virtual
currency for their shopping and web-based activities, and exchange it for over 2 million real rewards, including
gift cards to retail outlets such as Amazon, Ikea, iTunes or M&S.
For more info, visit www.pgs-soft.com 03