Since I joined iText in the same week as iText’s first ever virtual customer event, I felt very fortunate to get such a well-rounded introduction to our software and of our history in the PDF space. Even though it was still only my first week on the team, after attending all the day’s sessions I was starting to feel like an iText veteran with a comprehensive knowledge of all our products. However, as the customer showcase with Cymo demonstrated, there was still a lot for me to learn.
In this session Israel Garcia, the Product Manager for iText DITO, sat down with Wout Florin, Cymo’s Director of Operations to talk about how iText’s collaborative document generator forms an essential component of Cymo’s event-driven software platform. Cymo is a company with years of expertise in event-driven architecture, and the Cymo Platform was initially developed for the Mateco Group, an international rental equipment and sales company.
For those not in the know, an event-driven software architecture is a way to communicate asynchronously between applications and services. Wout explained that in this style of architecture your components don’t ask around for the state of other components, rather communicating behavior is what matters most; having each component react to events and then emitting its own event. This may all sound very abstract, but Wout emphasized that the benefit of communicating asynchronously is that your components are loosely coupled, and so you can scale them independently as you want.
Cymo’s goal is to help companies become event driven and make their lives easier in the process. To illustrate this, Wout recounted how they developed the Cymo Platform for their client, the Mateco Group. Six years ago, Mateco decided to transform their entire business program to better align on branding, processes, and IT systems. This was no small task considering Mateco has over 150 locations worldwide and are active in more than 16 countries. To achieve this transformation, they had to replace all of their different ERP systems around the world and build something new with the latest technology that can continue to be used long into the future. Mateco decided on a microservices approach for this system, and that’s where Cymo comes in. The goal for Cymo was to make sure that all the data flowed correctly across a multitude of applications.
Since Mateco is an international company, it was imperative to make sure that their customers were receiving quality PDFs. This task proved to be tricky because operating in a microservice landscape meant that all the data was spread across a multitude of locations. The answer to this issue was creating a centralized hub for all the data to flow to. By doing this Cymo could allow Mateco to create PDF documents by extracting data from this hub.
Now that the documents could be generated the next step was designing them, and that is when iText got involved. By utilizing iText DITO it was a breeze for Cymo to design great looking, multi-language PDF templates.
The developers at Mateco were already familiar with the iText SDK. So Cymo contacted iText to discuss whether they could help with document generation and templating. iText DITO was quickly realized as the best solution for this project given the experience the developers had with our product. Mateco’s philosophy during this project was “zero touch, zero footprint,” so the browser-based iText DITO was truly a perfect fit.
As the last session of the day Wout and Israel’s conversation really highlighted that iText doesn’t just provide you with a product. We are an ecosystem of partners who are constantly creating great things while growing and learning together. It is these reasons why we wanted to host our customer event. To showcase all the amazing things that our partners have been able to accomplish and to share a toast with all those we work with. Cheers!
This article was based on a talk given at iText’s 2022 customer event.