CASE STUDY

CRM Web Solutions

Marketing and Client Relationship Solutions for Child Care Professionals

CRM Web Solutions 1

Transforming child care customer relationship management on AWS

CRM Web Solutions is a software company that provides child care management solutions for individual child care centers and small to large multi-site organizations across the United States, Canada and Australia. Offering a platform that provides email marketing, customer relationship management, campaign reporting and child care business consulting services, CRM Web Solutions aims to support child care professionals by simplifying marketing and client relationship activities, allowing them to focus on positively impacting the lives of children. 

Industry

SaaS, Professional Services

Challenge

Migrating CRM platform onto AWS to improve performance, uptime, and cost effectiveness while supporting a growing user base. 

Services & Tech

Infrastructure, Migration, Networking, Cloud-Native Development

The Challenge

As a company in its growth stages, CRM Web Solutions was in search of a stable, rapidly scalable solution to host their CRM platform to accommodate their growing user base. CRM Web Solutions had been utilizing IBM Softlayer for 10 years, and over the past two years they were running into an increasingly poor experience, both in terms of high up-front costs and network errors by Softlayer that affected them and their customers. In the child-care industry, uptime is hugely important, and it is critical for their customers to be able to follow up on sales leads quickly. These leads can offer significant returns over their lifetime, so they are highly valuable to their customers, and any performance decrease or downtime can significantly affect their business. 

Using bare metal servers, it was difficult for CRM Web Solutions to easily scale their environment as they outgrew their hardware, and they had limited options for setting up auto-fault recovery and load balancing for their infrastructure. Routinely refreshing aging hardware would prove to be significantly expensive, with costs further escalating, due to over-provisioning to accommodate an audience that was constantly growing. 

They began to explore other options and were drawn to AWS because of its market leadership, pay-as-you-go pricing model, and product suite that is both flexible and easily scalable to support future growth. 

When selecting a partner to assist with the transition, Onica, a Premier Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) who has extensive technical AWS expertise in the SaaS & ISV industries, stood out above others for having helped many recognizable companies with similar types of migrations. 

CRM Web Solutions 2
"The expertise that Onica brought is part of how we were able to do this project successfully under a really tight timeline. Onica’s agile approach enabled us to refocus as we worked through the project to attain the results we wanted."
Seth Martin
CTO, CRM Web Solutions

The Solution

CRM Web Solutions’ environment in Softlayer consisted of two regions — US and AU — to account for latency and performance for their customers’ different locations. Each region’s environment was bare metal and had a web and application server along with a database server. There were limited options for setting up auto-fault recovery and load balancing, and scaling their resources required substantial time and cost.  As a result of their industry and market, the sizes of their customers’ datasets are quite varied, with some being a hundred times the size of others. Due to this, CRM Web Solutions found themselves always having over-provisioned resources, in order to ensure that their largest customers are supported on the platform.

Migrating to AWS addressed many of the challenges faced by CRM Web Solutions, including automated scalability, something they lacked while on Softlayer. Onica assisted in setting up their networking, Amazon VPC resources, configuring Amazon Route53, Amazon RDS for databases, and setting up their ChildCareCRM application on AWS Elastic Beanstalk.  Using AWS cloud-native technologies provides the inherent benefits of paying for only what your using, high availability, and the ability to scale up and down as demanded by their industry’s seasonal upticks and downticks of usage. For the first time, CRM Web Solutions is able to provision only the resources they need, at the right sizing, with the comfort of knowing that they can easily scale and deploy an entire production infrastructure by using Onica’s open-source Runway infrastructure deployment wrapper.  

Some of the reasons why CRM chose to engage with Onica for this project was their desire to minimize risk during the migration, and the depth and breadth of Onica’s experience in moving customers from on-prem to AWS. CRM had a very tight timeline for the project due to the seasonality of their application’s system usage. Using the agile scrum framework for the project was hugely valuable in allowing the team to refocus during different parts of the process and complete it on time with an excellent result.

WHY US

Why Onica

Onica is one of the largest and fastest-growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partners in the world, helping companies enable, operate, and innovate in the cloud. From migration strategy to operational excellence and immersive transformation, Onica is a full spectrum AWS integrator. Learn more at www.onica.com.