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Overview
In today’s market, a company developing and implementing data and analytics workloads is not unique. What makes iOLAP unique is that it has been hyperfocused on data and analytics workloads for the past twenty years. Their mission is to help clients drive innovation by applying new analytical technology and capabilities to unlock the value of their data. To learn more
Customer Challenges / The Opportunity
Grow its data and analytics practice, accelerate AWS Well-Architected Framework Reviews, and help customers optimize their AWSS deployments and costs.
Solution
iOLAP has been successfully serving its customers for twenty years with a “hyperfocus on data and analytics innovation.” In 2020, iOLAP made the strategic decision to double down on its AWS practice, which involved offering Well-Architected Framework Reviews (WAFRs) to its customers. However, this decision created a challenge because the WAFR process was highly manual and time-intensive.
Though executing a WAFR was an excellent way to open the door to new customers, it became a “loss leader” until iOLAP learned about nOps during an industry webinar on cloud innovation where nOps CEO JT Giri was presenting the capabilities of this cloud management platform. “And immediately, I was blown away by the feature set and how they seemed to be tailor-fit to solve a problem that we were facing,” said iOLAP Vice President and AWS practice lead, Nick Larsen, referring to their WAFR timeframe challenge. iOLAP decided to give it a try.
iOLAP now uses nOps across its entire business. Larsen said that nOps is “Something our team uses every single day across the board, from our managed services team to our operations team to our project delivery team. Every one of our solutions architects and practitioners is trained in nOps, and they absolutely love it.” nOps is part of iOLAP’s larger technology stack for managed services customers, including logging and alerting tools, paging tools, incident escalation, tools, service desk, tickets, etc. The positive impact of adopting and integrating nOps across iOLAP’s entire business sets an example for their customers because they speak from experience. A definite win-win scenario.
A Review that once took two to three weeks of labor-intensive time to execute is now completed in a matter of hours — a 95% time savings. iOLAP can now utilize staff members who are just starting their cloud journey as solutions architects, providing them with a guided training path to deliver a high-quality WAFR deliverable to their customers, while freeing their senior solutions architects to focus instead on what they do best.
Cost optimization is the nOps feature most used by iOLAP and its customers, closely followed by security. However, once they see the integration of the other Framework pillars, the adoption of other nOps features is almost automatic. Additionally, through nOps’s change management features, iOLAP gets early insight into when a customer starts using new AWS services — an important signal to proactively reach out to that customer and offer solutions and assistance that round out their quality of service (QoS). iOLAP also leverages nOps for deal advancement as they look at their consolidated billing and reseller model.
The partnership relationship between iOLAP and nOps has created a broad set of win-win scenarios composed of tangibles (e.g., time savings and business growth for iOLAP and cost savings for their customers) and intangibles (e.g., the successful collaboration between the iOLAP and nOps teams).
