Client overview

Granite Telecommunications — GEMM Platform

Delivered many months ahead of Granite’s original in-house development timeline — accelerating market entry and revenue ahead of projections.

Granite Telecommunications is one of the largest privately held telecommunications companies in the United States — a $1.8 billion provider of comprehensive communications and technology solutions headquartered in Quincy, Massachusetts. Founded in 2002, Granite was built on a model that the industry had largely overlooked: simplifying the sourcing and management of voice, data, and cellular services for multi-location enterprises through a single point of contact, consolidated invoicing, and 24/7/365 U.S.-based customer service.

That model proved extraordinarily durable. Over two decades, Granite grew into the leading corporate phone service provider to multi-location businesses in North America — managing 1.75 million voice and data lines across more than 650,000 locations, serving more than three-quarters of Fortune 100 companies, and building a customer base that spans small businesses, large enterprises, and government agencies at the federal, state, and local levels.

Granite’s solution portfolio covers the full spectrum of modern enterprise communications: voice services including VoIP, hosted PBX, Microsoft Teams integration, and POTS replacement through its proprietary EPIK technology; network access solutions including broadband, dedicated ethernet, fixed wireless, and Starlink; cloud services including SASE/SD-WAN, zero trust security, and cloud onramp; managed field services including structured cabling, nationwide rollouts, and same-day equipment replacement; and mobility solutions spanning multi-carrier SIM, wireless data, mobile device management, and device-as-a-service.

Granite also operates Granite Labs — an internal innovation unit developing proprietary technologies including edgeboot (remote device management), FlexEdge, and EPIK Edge — and Granite360, a managed services platform providing network operations, technical support, and access management capabilities. The company’s philanthropic commitment is equally notable: Granite has donated over $300 million to charities, and its annual “Saving by Shaving” fundraiser has raised more than $50 million for pediatric research and treatments at Boston Children’s Hospital.

With approximately 2,200 employees, recognitions including Forbes Best Mid-Size Employers, multiple Stevie Awards, and consistent placement among Massachusetts’ most charitable companies, Granite is by any measure an enterprise-grade organization — which makes the nature of 305 Spin’s engagement with them particularly noteworthy.

“We hired 305 Spin to build our Mobility Marketplace at Granite and could not have been happier with the results. John’s team is a breeze to work with and drives a high quality output at very reasonable prices. The result was an industry leading e-commerce platform integrated with our supply chain management system to provide real time inventory management, checkout and shipping, all customizable in a multi-tenant environment. 305’s ongoing support is excellent. I would not hesitate to hire them for future projects.”

— Dan McDuffie, former General Manager Wireless at Granite Telecommunications

THE CHALLENGE

An enterprise platform. An aggressive deadline. A legacy integration problem.

In Spring 2021, Granite’s marketing leadership brought 305 Spin into the Granite Enterprise Mobility Management (GEMM) initiative — an ambitious program to give Granite’s enterprise clients a significantly better digital experience for ordering and managing mobility products and services online.

GEMM was not a greenfield project. It sat at the intersection of three significant constraints:

The combination of legacy integration complexity, a parallel Salesforce implementation, and a compressed timeline had created a gap: Granite’s in-house team was capable of building GEMM, but not within the timeframe the business needed. 305 Spin was brought in specifically because the situation required a team that could deliver enterprise-grade work quickly — without introducing new risk into a complex, multi-system environment.

The development timeline 305 Spin proposed and executed was many months less than the original in-house development timeline — enabling Granite’s marketing team to get to market ahead of schedule and increase sales and revenues ahead of their original projections.

THE WORK

Architecture first. Delivery second.

305 Spin worked collaboratively with both the GEMM marketing team and Granite’s in-house development team — operating as a complementary force rather than a replacement. The engagement began with a focused architecture phase: understanding Granite’s existing AWS environment, mapping the legacy backend systems GEMM needed to connect to, planning the Salesforce integration touch points, and designing a system architecture that could be built quickly without accumulating technical debt.

INTEGRATION COMPLEXITY

Three systems. One coherent experience.

The most technically demanding aspect of GEMM was the integration layer — the work of making a new, modern enterprise portal communicate seamlessly with systems that were never designed to work with it.

Legacy Backend Integration

Granite’s internal legacy systems contain years of accumulated business logic, product data, account information, and operational workflows. GEMM needed to read from and write to those systems without disrupting their ongoing operation, without requiring those systems to be rebuilt, and without exposing their complexity to enterprise clients using the portal.

305 Spin’s headless .NET API layer handles this translation entirely. Enterprise clients interact with the clean Angular frontend; their orders and requests pass through the .NET API, which translates them into the format Granite’s legacy systems expect, submits them, processes the responses, and returns results to the frontend in a format the portal can display. The legacy systems never need to know they’re talking to a web application.

Salesforce Integration

The simultaneous rollout of Salesforce at Granite created an additional integration requirement: GEMM needed to connect not just to Granite’s legacy systems, but to the new CRM platform coming online at the same time. 305 Spin designed the Salesforce integration in parallel with the legacy system work — ensuring that orders entered through GEMM populate the correct Salesforce records, that account data in Salesforce is accessible within GEMM where relevant, and that the two systems remain synchronized as both continue to evolve.

FTP Batch Data Exchange

The ongoing data synchronization between GEMM and Granite’s internal systems runs through a scheduled FTP batch process — handling the large-scale, regular import and export of data sets that keep the portal’s product catalog, pricing, account information, and order status current. This was designed for reliability and recoverability: batch processes include error handling, logging, and alerting to ensure that data synchronization failures are identified and addressed promptly rather than silently corrupting the portal’s data state.

THE OUTCOME

Faster to market. Ahead of revenue projections.

The GEMM engagement produced a measurable business outcome that went beyond the technical deliverable: 305 Spin’s development timeline was many months shorter than Granite’s original in-house projection, enabling the GEMM marketing team to launch the platform ahead of their planned go-to-market date and begin generating incremental enterprise mobility revenue ahead of their financial projections.

This is the outcome that matters most in an engagement of this type. GEMM wasn’t built to demonstrate technical elegance — it was built to give Granite’s enterprise clients a better way to order mobility products online, and to do so quickly enough that Granite could capture market opportunity before competitors closed the window. Both goals were met.

Getting to market months earlier than the internal timeline projected meant Granite’s sales and marketing teams could begin converting enterprise clients through the new portal ahead of schedule — generating revenue that, by definition, would not have existed under the original timeline.

The architectural choices that made this possible — a headless .NET API layer as the integration abstraction, Angular as the frontend framework, working within Granite’s existing AWS environment rather than introducing new infrastructure — were not just good engineering. They were timeline decisions. Each choice reduced the surface area of the build, clarified the integration points, and allowed 305 Spin to move faster without sacrificing the quality that an enterprise client of Granite’s scale required.

WHAT THIS ENGAGEMENT REPRESENTS

Enterprise-grade delivery at startup speed.

Granite Telecommunications is a $1.8 billion enterprise with 2,200 employees, an in-house development team, and the resources to build what it needs. The fact that Granite brought 305 Spin in — and that the engagement resulted in delivery many months ahead of the internal projection — says something specific about what 305 Spin is and how it works.

It isn’t about size. It’s about pattern recognition. 305 Spin had built this type of system before: a customer-facing portal with a headless API backend, connected to a mix of legacy systems and modern CRM platforms, hosted in a client-controlled cloud environment. The architecture wasn’t invented for Granite — it was applied to Granite’s specific context based on what we already knew worked.

That experience is what compresses timelines. Not cutting corners, not skipping steps — but starting from a known architectural foundation rather than designing everything from scratch. Granite’s in-house team had the capability to build GEMM. 305 Spin had the pattern — and that difference was measured in months of revenue.

The collaborative model also mattered. 305 Spin worked alongside Granite’s internal teams — marketing and development — rather than replacing them. The GEMM marketing team drove the product requirements and go-to-market strategy; Granite’s development team provided internal system knowledge and managed the Salesforce rollout context; 305 Spin provided the architecture and delivery. Each team did what it was best positioned to do.

TECHNOLOGY STACK

Enterprise architecture. Clean and scalable.

Frontend

Angular · Custom Enterprise UX · Responsive Design · Guided Order Entry

Backend

.NET Headless API · REST Architecture · Business Logic Layer · System Integration Abstraction

Database

Microsoft SQL Server · Centralized Data Model · FTP Batch Import / Export

Cloud Infrastructure

Amazon AWS · AWS Web Services · AWS S3 Private Storage · Client-Owned Environment

Integrations

Granite Legacy Backend Systems · Salesforce CRM · FTP Batch Data Exchange · REST APIs

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Every client story started the same way — someone told us what was going on, and we listened.