InfraPros

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am Vice President of Technology at an industry leading global business services firm. We serve a diverse client base from SMB to Fortune 50 across all major industries. My responsibilities have included owning our enterprise services platform and infrastructure as well as the technology management office for mergers and acquisitions.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire InfraPros?

Our enterprise platform and infrastructure hosted in our on-prem data centers was aging and lacked a consistent architecture. Time to market for new products was slow and our cost to maintain continued to increase.

We reached a tipping point and decided to begin re-architecting and rebuilding in the cloud. At the time we lacked the experience and expertise for this effort so we started looking for a vendor to partner with and found InfraPros.

What were your goals for this project?

We set out to change the way we build, deploy, host and support software as an organization. We wanted a well thought out micro-services architecture on which to incrementally build out a new platform, to adopt agile best practices and build a CI/CD pipeline to deliver features to market faster, and leverage AWS cloud services to reduce our infrastructure maintenance overhead and improve our up-time.

Our feature development was focused on process automation and machine learning so that we could deliver better services faster to our clients.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

We looked at several vendors. InfraPros stood out with their impressive collection of top-tier engineers and deep cloud experience and expertise. Their approach during our vendor selection process was extremely collaborative, informative and our trust grew with each interaction. By the end of the process they stood out as the clear choice.

Describe the project in detail.

I was the owner of our digital and cloud transformation program. This program consisted of several projects. The first was focused on establishing a new cloud-native architecture leveraging AWS infrastructure and platform services.

Another was creating a CI/CD pipeline to AWS to include multiple layers and facets of automated tests, including security and performance testing.

After establishing this foundation we kicked off several projects focused on automating delivery of our products and services to reduce high costs of manual labor, improve product quality by increasing accuracy of results and reduce service delivery times (a key metric for our clients).

What was the team composition?

InfraPros provided a team (3 architects) responsible for architecture and common/shared enterprise software and tooling as well as a number of principal engineers that were dispersed among our scrum teams to provide technical leadership and serve as high performing engineers.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

The first project that we kicked off with InfraPros was establishing a new cloud-based, micro-services architecture hosted on AWS. Within weeks, InfraPros defined a go-forward, cloud native architecture and within the first month, we had services leveraging this new architecture built and deployed through a new CI/CD pipeline live on AWS.

New infrastructure, fully configured and tested could now be deployed within minutes rather than weeks. Software deployments which previously took hours of manual effort and was error-prone to move software through all environments to production was now fully automated with quality tests and performance thresholds.

Thereafter, Infrapros helped us build and deploy new highly available, distributed services that enabled high levels of process automation delivering lower cost products to our clients in a fraction of the time. Additionally, InfraPros has helped us reduce our overall cloud costs, in some cases by as much as 50%, by deploying server-less, containerized solutions.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

InfraPros collaborative demeanor helped maintain effective communication throughout the course of the program. They coordinated regularly scheduled daily meetings with the teams as well as regular communications with myself and other stakeholders.

They effectively helped manage and lead the off-shore teams engaged in the project as well. Beyond the effective, regular communications, their ability to establish trust and highly productive working relationships not only with fellow engineers but also with technical leadership and business stakeholders is above and beyond any other vendor I have worked with in the past.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

There are two things I would call out of many impressive attributes of InfraPros and my experience with them.

First, is the level of quality of their engineers. Their technical knowledge and productivity are second to none. They have an ability to produce the right solution the first time and at a fast pace. Second is their ability to develop strong working relationships with every team member and stakeholder (technical or not).

Are there any areas for improvement?

InfraPros continued to impress throughout the engagement. Their ability to deliver the right solution, on-time every time was an uncommon experience for me in my 16 years working with vendors in the technology space. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a partner with deep experience in cloud architectures / platforms.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am a Director of Engineering and Research in a leading global services company with over 3000 employees.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire InfraPros?

We had a lot of disparate systems built as we grew over the years. There was a dire need to re platform with modern technologies and architecture with a cloud first approach.

What were your goals for this project?

Build a robust and flexible system to serve our current and future needs

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor?

InfraPros exhibited deep experience and good talent pool that could help achieve our goal.

Describe the project in detail.

Built on micro services architecture with a cloud first approach. We utilized AWS as our primary cloud vendor and over time also diversified with Microsoft Azure.

What was the team composition?

We had around 8 scrum teams spread across the globe. Each team is self-sufficient and adopting DevOps and Agile culture.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

InfraPros helped us to build a new cloud platform allowing us to adapt quickly and deliver consistently. We can now iterate quickly, reducing months-long timelines into two-week sprints.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

InfraPros Engineers and Architects were ingrained as part of our teams and brought their varied and deep experience to help the team achieve its goals.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

I am most impressed by the quality of people that they have engaged with us in our projects. They were technically well-versed, all while possessing the soft skills needed to work in a team and understand the big picture and articulate their ideas backed by thorough research on the topic at hand.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I am satisfied with the engagement and I can say both teams learned from each other.