Pilotcore

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am the Lead, Software Engineering of Collage HR

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Collage is a complete HR, benefits, and payroll solution designed to help you seamlessly manage your employees.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Pilotcore to accomplish?

• AWS infrastructure

SOLUTION

How did you find Pilotcore?

• Online Search
• Clutch Site

Why did you select Pilotcore over others?

• High ratings
• Close to my geographic location
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Pilotcore were assigned to this project?

1 Employee

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

Provide thought leadership on AWS and DevOps and educate client staff on how to take full advantage of the AWS platform. 

• Technical discovery & requirements analysis to reach technology & design decisions, identify risks and plan implementation activities.
• Architect AWS and DevOps solutions and processes and provide guidance on best practice solutions and design patterns for the AWS deployments. 
• Actively participate in implementation and integration efforts related to the AWS deployments and DevOps tools. 
• Provide guidance and assist the application development teams in creating product architectures that meet specific requirements from AWS deployment and operations perspective. 
• Establish a mature, robust, efficient, industry-standard overall architecture in AWS. Assist the Client in establishing Industry Best Practices for implementing the required capabilities in AWS while keeping in mind the principles of security, scalability, high- availability, and high-performance and monitoring. 
• Review specific security and compliance requirements provided by the client and design an overall architecture in AWS meeting those requirements. 
• Assist the client in developing the reports and audit processes required to ensure respect of the client’s specific security and compliance requirements.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

our staging environment was set up in its entirety in aws, including ECS, cloudfront, load balancing, fargate, cron jobs, etc. our app was 100% functional in the new infrastructure

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

the project was delivered on time, and the agreed-upon scope was implemented fully.

What was your primary form of communication with Pilotcore?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Nelson did a great job at figuring out numerous things specific to our setup, resolving unforeseen problems as they arose. he provided further guidance and advice on things outside of the original scope as well

Are there any areas for improvement or something Pilotcore could have done differently?

-

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and position.

I am a former Director at Let's Talk Science

Describe what your company does in a single sentence.

Let’s Talk Science is an EdTech organization providing K-12 educators with a portfolio of digital tools and resources focused on science, technology, engineering and math.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What specific goals or objectives did you hire Pilotcore to accomplish?

• Develop an AWS strategy
• Migrate on-premise servers infrastructure to the Cloud
• Implement AWS services and best practices

SOLUTION

How did you find Pilotcore?

• Online Search
• Clutch Site

Why did you select Pilotcore over others?

• High ratings
• Pricing fit our budget
• Good value for cost

How many teammates from Pilotcore were assigned to this project?

2-5 Employees

Describe the scope of work in detail. Please include a summary of key deliverables.

• Develop a comprehensive, long-term cloud strategy for the organization 
• Migrate existing content and functionalities from on-premise, physical servers to the cloud 
• Implement AWS infrastructure, DevOps and best practices for all of the organization digital services

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What were the measurable outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

• Full migration of on-premise serves content and the ability to discontinue their use. 
• Full implementation of AWS configuration for hosting, development operations and cybersecurity

Describe their project management. Did they deliver items on time? How did they respond to your needs?

A project manager was assigned to the project and put in charge of monitoring deliverables and communication. Pilotcore always delivered on time on the items assigned to them and was always responsive to inquiries and requests.

What was your primary form of communication with Pilotcore?

• Virtual Meeting
• Email or Messaging App

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Dedication and willingness to go the extra mile even when challenges came up on our end.

Are there any areas for improvement or something Pilotcore could have done differently?

We started the project with a different understanding of the skills and capacity available on our end. The existing system configuration also proved to be more complex than anticipated. These were, however, issues originating on our end.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

CTL Law is a law firm. I am the owner and president of the firm and a lawyer.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Pilotcore?

We hired Pilotcore as cloud consultant as well as to set up our complete AWS environment and create a documents pipeline to use Textract and Comprehend

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We found this vendor online and then proceeded with an interview.

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Creation of a complete AWS cloud infrastructure involving multiple accounts; our online custom made portal is being developed on and hosted by AWS; our custom made online portal required a documents pipeline to use Textract and Comprehend, amongst other AI processes. Pilotcore undertook to create this documents pipeline for us but after paying over double then the amount initially quoted to us by this provided it became apparent the provider did not have sufficient expertise in programming to undertake such a project.

When realizing it was unable to complete the project, Pilotcore abandoned our firm leaving us in a very precarious situation after an investment with them of approximately CND $150,000. As a result, we had to hire other AWS experts at great costs to complete our project and save our investment.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

3 individuals. One was Nelson F., the Owner, the others I do not know that position, but they assisted Nelson with dev works.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

We successfully migrated data from our legacy platform to our AWS environments.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

It was good until it became apparent PilotCore was unable to properly complete the documents pipeline which they were to build for us.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Nelson Ford, the owner of PilotCore, does not accept criticism well. A becomes very defensive and uncooperative when faced with criticism.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

PilotCore should have advised that they do not the competency required to create a complex documents pipeline of the sort which we required.

Company Responses

The service provider responded on January 11, 2023.

• The cost estimate provided in the contract’s statement of work (SOW) and signed by the client prior to project start was based on time and materials for the scope outlined therein.
• As explicitly specified in the SOW, the document upload processing portion of the project was to use the AWS services Textract and Comprehend for OCR, text analysis, and classification and this portion, along with the rest of the SOW was completed by Pilotcore. 
• Late in the project the client revealed new requirements to process document formats that were not supported by the aforementioned AWS services or technically in scope for the SOW, and which therefore would entail significant effort due to the need to integrate multiple third party (non-AWS) tools, add custom programming, and undertake testing and debugging iterations. 
• The client assured Pilotcore after each scope increase that the client would bear the additional cost for the new scope. 
• In an effort to accommodate the client Pilotcore took on the new scope.
• The client began to demand under threat of litigation that their remaining additional scope items be completed free of charge. 
• When it was clear that no mutually acceptable path forward could be found, Pilotcore ended the relationship with the client. 
• The total amount paid to Pilotcore by this client is CAD $109,497.00 including tax, not $150,000.00 as claimed by Mr. Sauvageau in his complaint above.
• Important lessons were learned as a result of this engagement, and we thank Mr. Sauvageau for his feedback.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the CTO of a mobile payment solutions provider to the parking industry.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Pilotcore?

Our legacy infrastructure was based around EC2 instances and traditional server provisioning automation. We engaged PilotCore to aid us in moving towards infrastructure as code (Terraform) and a serverless architecture (ECS+Fargate).

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We choose PilotCore because Nelson

Describe the project in detail and walk through the stages of the project.

Initially there were several rounds of discovery and discussion about our needs, potential solutions and analysis of pros/cons. Nelson took the time to walk us through and educate us on areas that our internal development team lacked knowledge of. The second phase was the implementation phase. Nelson and his team were flexible given our on going needs and always stepped up to find cost effect and appropriate solutions.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Nelson was the project co-ordinator and main developer. He also had a senior cloud engineer Peter that assisted him.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

The cloud migration was a success and did not impact production operations. Infrastructure is now managed via code and the internal development team was empowered to extend and add to the code base.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They were always available and ready to answer any questions over Slack. There were weekly status calls. Anytime there was an emergency or high priority, they worked with us to find a solution.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Their understanding and experience with the AWS suite of products and solutions.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

None

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a private equity company. I am the Operating Partner in charge of IT.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Pilotcore?

We were moving all of our database and VM assets to AWS. Initially we hired Pilotcore to help setup a Redshift database. After the initial project it was obvious that Pilotcore would be helpful to us in a broader role. Now Pilotcore is on retainer and manages all of our AWS assets, and configuration.

What were your goals for this project?

We wanted to move and consolidate all of our databases, VM's, and ETL pipelines to AWS. Pilotcore offered a number of great suggestions. We took all of them and have a far better solution as a result.

SOLUTION

How did you select Pilotcore?

Initially we were looking for a company to help us with a small project in AWS. After working with Pilotcore we expanded their role.

Describe the project in detail.

Pilotcore used Terraform to setup assets for 5 of our platform companies. Each of these platforms required a bastion server, a redshift cluster, and a variable number of VM's. Pilotcore made a number of suggestions about architecture which greatly improved security, and redundancy. Pilotcore is on retainer with us now and handles all AWS related configuration and architecture planning.

What was the team composition?

We have been working directly with Nelson, the company owner.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

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

All of our VM's and databases have been deployed without issue. The structurnted has been very robust.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Workflow has been great. We generally hold a few meetings as needed and communicate via Slack otherwise.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

The attention to detail and commitment to the process is admirable. Terraform requires a lot more work up front, but the value is obvious. I have no question about the state of our AWS assets. The level of competence was obvious after just a single meeting.

Are there any areas for improvement?

No, I don't have any complaints about the service.