Schub

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

My company provides software services for enterprise contact centers. I work as a program director, and my team does software implementation.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with flugel.it?

We needed them to help us automate the deployment of our software.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

flugel.it remotely assisted us in deploying our software. We started by working on the product’s configuration — we built an appliance that we could deploy in the customer environment.  The configuration information described how we should deploy the software across the target environment.  They then used Chef Infra Server to bootstrap the application servers, rolled out the software, and reported the results back to the consultant. Finally, they deployed the product.

What is the team composition?

Diego (CEO & Co-Founder) was our main liaison. We also worked with 3–4 developers and one project manager from their team.

How did you come to work with flugel.it?

We found them on a job marketplace where we previously hired a team from. Upon reading their profile, we thought they had the right expertise that we needed to solve our problems.

How much have you invested with them?\

Overall, we spent around $1,000,000–$5,000,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The project ran from July 2015–March 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Through the tools that flugel.it built for us, we were able to reduce our consultant’s installation time by 40–60%, depending on the size of the customer installation. That was really the key metric for us. It was huge for us to be able to tell our customers that we can deploy their software in a month instead of two or three more — that success alone spoke volumes.

How did flugel.it perform from a project management standpoint?

Though it was hard to put timelines together at times because of our time zones, they were always there to work with us in scoping and estimating all the work. We didn’t have any major communication problems because their project manager was always there to help us with translations.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their ability to bring creative solutions to the table impressed us the most.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I didn’t find any particular area that they could improve on.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Just be as specific as you can. The more willing you are to bring all the requirements to the table and let them know what you want to accomplish, the better they’ll be in delivering according to your expectations. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the CEO at ConfigureID. We are an online product, customization, and personalization platform.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with flugel.it?

We have pretty involved infrastructure supporting our technology. Most of the services run in Kubernetes and it operates in mainland China. We had been working with a different DevOps partner and it was just expensive. That’s why we partnered with flugel.it to spend less money on our DevOps configurations without sacrificing the quality of our work. 

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

The system was basically functional when they arrived, so it wasn’t a matter of creating things from scratch. flugel.it supports us in reducing inefficiencies in our existing system. 

They’ve assisted us with CircleCI. It has a component architecture called Orbs and the team helped us implement it in our continuous integration (CI)/continuous deployment (CD) configurations. By doing that, it just made things more compact, consistent, and maintainable.

Secondly, flugel.it introduced Helm Charts into our Kubernetes configuration, which is also a way to make our configuration more efficient and less repetitive. It also promotes less room for error. 

Thirdly, we've been migrating between different cloud platforms, and when flugel.it came on board, we were split between Google and Amazon. In the end, they helped us finish the migration on Google Cloud. 

They’ve also helped us migrate from New Relic to Prometheus. At that time, we were motivated strictly by saving money since New Relic was a fairly expensive solution. Then, flugel.it provided advice on how to do it and supported us with the best practices they know. Their team has been able to lay out all the details on how things should be done. 

More recently, they’ve helped us introduce our own infrastructure into the mix where we have our own data center. The idea is that we run the baseload on our own infrastructure, and then use Google for the spikes in traffic. 

What is the team composition?

I work with Gabriel (IT Project Manager), and he's our main point of contact. We’ve also worked with three other people who have been in a supporting capacity and their functions include advising and assisting Gabriel on technical issues. 

How did you come to work with flugel.it?

I was searching around the web for a DevOps provider. We did a few interviews and decided to move forward with flugel.it. 

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $100,000. From May 2019 onwards, we’ve spent $10,400 per month. Then, from July 2020 onwards, we’ve spent $5,200 per month. 

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working in January 2019, and we continue to collaborate. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

We’ve set up objectives and key results in order to see the team's contribution. The most important thing we’ve been measuring is infrastructure costs. As an overview,  we look at the cost per page view and the volume of traffic our clients generate. Then, we look at the cost of the infrastructure to support that traffic.

So far, we’ve been pushing the infrastructure costs down and it has improved over time with the team’s help. They’re definitely getting a better handle on it and have the capability to bring it down. 

How did flugel.it perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been good and they have adapted well to working with us. Moreover, the team has been flexible both in terms of staffing as well as with processes. Additionally, their communication is outstanding and they manage their tasks well. Most of all, they’ve been very thorough in working within our framework. 

What did you find most impressive about them?

With the migration from New Relic to Prometheus, they have definitely shown us that they could do a nice job managing complex requirements, giving advice, and implementing it. 

Are there any areas they could improve?

Everything has been smooth and I don't have any constructive feedback. 

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

The value they bring is their expertise and experience in their organization. You’ll benefit from working with flugel.it if you listen to them and give them the opportunity to do so. They’re also a good partner if you want to delve deep into great technical discussions about the pros and cons of ways on how to address things. 

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the CTO of Wimo. We are a shipping software as a service for e-commerce companies.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with flugel.it?

When we started, we were looking for professionals to set up our cloud-based infrastructure based on AWS. We had no internal resources to do that job, so we started looking for a provider that could help us.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

flugel.it was responsible for setting up our infrastructure on AWS. They set up our database and they set up log-in tools using Elastic and Kibana. They used Grafana for building dashboards to monitor the performance of the infrastructure databases. As we evolved more, we switched everything to Kubernetes to orchestrate the different aspects of the infrastructure.

What is the team composition?

My main contact was one of the senior engineers, but we communicated with many people. We were also in contact with Diego (CTO & Co-Founder). He was the first point of contact and was always available.

How did you come to work with flugel.it?

After some research, we found flugel.it and from the moment we started talking to them, it was very obvious that they know what they are doing and that they could handle the job well. The way they are structured internally and the 24/7 support that they provide is something we found to be essential for the infrastructure work, especially when we were starting. We had no internal support, so they were the right fit for the job.

How much have you invested in them?

We invested over $50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

It started early in January 2019. We started doing more work internally, so the engagement ended in December 2020.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

flugel.it met the requirements of the project. At some point, they were exceeding our expectations by making suggestions about things that we were not aware of. It was very good, and they met our expectations.

How did flugel.it perform from a project management standpoint?

We were always on Slack and that was basically our main communication tool. Every time we discussed a certain project, they have an internal project management tool where they build their tasks and assign them to the different stakeholders and give the client visibility on how the tasks are assigned.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their knowledge and level of expertise. They have a broad set of expertise among the team, and you will always get answers to your questions. They are always up to date as well, and I would highly recommend them.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There is nothing I would complain about, to be honest. Things went smoothly with them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

If you are starting from scratch, I would recommend that you actually use their services because it makes more sense when you are starting from the beginning because they come with their own stack of technologies.

They are experts when it comes to using those stacks. I would highly recommend them to people who are just getting started or are in a phase where they are revamping the infrastructure.