Bluelight Consulting

Please describe your company and your position there.

My company core business is affiliate marketing within the entertainment industry. I'm the owner of partner operations processes of certain markets from Europe. I deal with KPIs, accounts creation and monitoring.

For what projects/services did your company hire Bluelight Consulting?

We decided to transfer our customer-facing applications away from Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Google Cloud Platform. This need arose as a result of the high-cost structure, dependence on AWS services, and the lack of flexibility challenges we encountered while operating our business on AWS. All our web and mobile applications through which our customers managed services, paid bills, checked rewards, and subscribed to plans were all on AWS, but it was proving unsustainable for our business.

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

We did some prospecting about the best nearshore IT staff augmentation service providers in California and got positive recommendations about how good the team at Bluelight Consulting is. When we contacted them, they were great and quick to engage. They brought in an architect and really tried to help us understand what they can do for us and what was possible on GCP.

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

We had a couple of tasks we brought in the expertise of Bluelight Consulting to manage and deliver our desired outcomes. They helped us:

• Create a GCP Account and ensure the team have relevant access to existing AWS instances
• Configure project and organization on GCP for migration
• Create relevant roles & service accounts following permission structure on AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management)
• Set up an account in the tool for exporting and migrating VM
• Install agent tool in AWS EC2 instances to enable live replication
• Create blueprint (properties of target machine on Google Cloud type of instance, name, subnet etc) for configuration of instance on Google Cloud once the replication is completed
• Launch machines on GCP in test mode to test continuous data replication between AWS and GCP
• Complete testing on the migrated instance and implement cutover mode to remove all contact with AWS instance

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

We had a Cloud Architect, a Cloud Engineer, and a Project Manager.

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

Following a short discovery phase, they took over the project and successfully migrated our consumer-facing apps from AWS to GCP. The migration was seamless. No one noticed that we switched to a completely different cloud provider. To be honest, using GCP is like having a black box. We just push the code, and GCP does what it needs to do to keep the system running.

Once we push the code, App Engine, and the other services scale automatically, which saves us a lot of debugging time. It’s just a super simple system to use, with super simple services. But the best part is we achieved significant cost savings, as we had envisioned with the success of this migration.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

They ran a really big project with many stakeholders and really went out of their way to ensure that all stakeholders are consulted and eased in their concerns. They were also extremely flexible with the changes we requested and always completed all the projects on schedule. I'm really happy to have worked with them.

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

From the get-go, you can tell that Bluelight Consulting's certified specialists have field experience with large-scale migration projects across a variety of industries. Look, our legacy solution stack was leveraging ec2 to run our applications, it was expensive and we had to dedicate entire servers to one application.

The team from Bluelight Consulting was able to work with our legacy applications. They containerized them and created a CI pipeline to support building and deploying to GKE. Now we can run the same amount of applications on a third of resources. They delivered. Everything they do, be it assessing existing workloads, developing a strategic plan, performing production deployments, to mentoring your teams, is best in class and bespoke to your business with clear attention to detail.

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

They are a complete package.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I'm and HR-IT Lead Consultant & Project Manager at Flexso for People

For what projects/services did your company hire Bluelight Consulting, and what were your goals?

We have a proprietary custom software product that is essential to how our business runs and serves our clients. Unfortunately, we were facing challenges with the existing development partner responsible for updating and maintaining our software. In a nutshell: 2 years elapsed without any major updates Software features did not correspond with their requests Communication was a problem and ineffective

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

When we realized we wanted to go in another direction because of the challenges we were facing with our previous development partners, we sought to find the best custom software development providers in the US. After extensive due diligence and meetings with the CEO, Chase Bolt, their service offering stood out to us compared to the other options we were looking at at the time.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We decided to work with the team at Bluelight Consulting to get product development back on track with a range of new feature releases. We also needed a reimagination of the application's architecture to allow for larger clients and build a new sustainable process to ensure visibility, alignment, and communication between client teams. Lastly, we wanted them to be able to work with in-house staff to design and build a tool to implement best Agile practices for product development.

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

The team we are working with is made up of a full stack developer, a designer, and a front-end developer.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The Bluelight Consulting team took over the software development process fully in one month. We established an improved production process while delivering 3 major and 6 minor releases in 9 months. Each release was right on schedule and within the set budget limits. Along with these releases, we redesigned the product to increase scalability and improve performance with the latest technologies.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

They have maintained clear and open communication between us and are always committed to ensuring we are on the same page at every stage of the development process. We use slack for communication and Clickup for managing projects. Overall, everything is working seamlessly.

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

We’ve worked with a few nearshore development companies and Bluelight Consulting has been the best we’ve dealt with. Their developers delivered quickly, deployments were relatively bug-free, they were reactive to our concerns and worked with us instead of trying to milk the situation. Top marks.

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

We had some initial miscommunication between the sales staff and delivery team, but the team handled the situation very professionally and came through without issue.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a subsidiary of one of the most prominent car parts dealers in the US that have been in operation for over 15 years offering services across all the states.

For what projects/services did your company hire Bluelight Consulting, and what were your goals?

We engaged Bluelight Consulting to help us build a new storefront for an existing ERP and integrate different systems into one easy-to-use platform with potential for scaling.

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

They stood from a host of service providers we had shortlisted for the project.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Web Development, UX/UI Design. Ruby on Rails development, and React development

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

2 Ruby on Rails developers, a React.js developer, a project manager and a Front-end designer.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Our new storefront was released successfully and quickly received positive opinions from car parts dealers. The ease of use and the number of details were mentioned as primary advantages. From the release date, all our clients can buy almost any car part they want through the Internet.

What have we achieved?

• successful long-term communication within the agile framework
• well-received and well-established storefront
• the unified ecosystem of car parts
• We can now sell car parts all around the US
• They delivered a platform that was easy to upgrade and add new features.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

They went out of their way to ensure communication, updates, and collaboration was seamless.

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

The fact that they provide nearshore staff augmentation with top talent from Latin America rather than offshore made the engagement much easier because we didn't have to deal with timezone issues among a host of other benefits we hadn't envisaged.

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

They are still growing in terms of their in-house talent, but otherwise, everything about them is exactly what you'd ask for in such a project.

Please describe your company and your position there.

We are a mid-sized travel company that provides a ticket marketplace for US Railway connections. Users click, order, and pay within a few days, they have the ticket delivered to their doorstep. Our service allows users to travel around the US with a single ticket. We were on the lookout for a new development team to take over the management of performance audits, framework upgrades as well as security check-ups and updates.

For what projects/services did your company hire Bluelight Consulting?

We brought in the team from Bluelight Consulting for Ruby on Rails development, UX/UI design, and optimizing our business processes.

How did you select this vendor?

We got a referral from someone who worked successfully with them on a similar project.

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

They set up a meeting with us to define milestones. They introduced us to their working process (two-week sprints, daily stand-up reports, and more) and mapped out how they would integrate with our operational setup. This has contributed greatly to a seamless engagement and everything has been as we'd hoped it'd turn out. They scheduled had a progress report meeting with us every two weeks.

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

The team comprised 3 developers, a designer, and a project manager.

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

They have helped us optimize business processes within the payment module resulting in a decrease in transactional costs. Not only that, but our framework is up-to-date, and a better UX/UI has contributed greatly to increased website traffic and conversion rates. Overall, the business is seeing a significant increase in sales.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The project was completed successfully.

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

One thing we were super happy about the Bluelight Consulting team is they are friendly and transparent in communication. They kept us updated on developments consistently. You could tell how enthusiastic they were to do a great job.

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

So far we are happy with how things are going. There have been no major issues really.