Springboard is a leading provider of data and insights on customer activity in stores and shopping destinations with customer counting and demographic profiling.
When Agidea began working with Springboard they were facing several challenges with their existing ASP.NET web applications, hosted on collocated servers in a traditional data center. Having collocated servers meant that adding extra capacity was a slow and costly process. Servers had to be paid for in advance and overprovisioned to accommodate for spikes in demand. System stability was also an issue at peak times.
Senior stakeholders at Springboard had previously worked on successful projects with Agidea and as a result Springboard senior management team had confidence that Agidea’s track record and management style would fit well with the Springboard technology team.
Three years later all core compute resources have been migrated to an AWS Cloud environment. Stability and scaling issues are trivial to solve, and costs have been reduced by implementing an on-demand model for resource provisioning.
Springboard is a data solutions business that measures customer activity, demographics and sentiment with unmatched accuracy. Springboard enable retail businesses to benchmark performance nationally, regionally and locally.
Springboard deliver accurate, consistent data so that their clients can make informed decisions. From customers and vehicle counting, to demographic profile and audience sentiment, Springboard deliver data with unrivalled precision.
Persistent server issues at peak times were causing a lot of stress for the Springboard team and an often resulted in a poor experience for their customers. Scaling up compute resource was not always able to solve the problem and IT bills were increasing with little confidence that system performance was going improve.
Having worked with AWS for a number of years, including on several high-profile projects, Agidea were well placed to offer support and architectural advice to Springboard. Agidea worked with the Springboard technology team to address the specific pain points that the business was facing and had confidence that AWS infrastructure would be capable of meeting these demands.
AWS was easy to recommend as Springboard needed to scale hardware capacity and reduce cost. The on-demand nature of AWS would allow Springboard to meet these goals in a way that pre-provisioned on-premises providers could not.
Agidea has been working continually on AWS development with Springboard since 2016. Agidea were chosen because they had successfully worked with senior stakeholders on other projects and Springboard’s management team felt that their track record and management style would fit well with the Springboard technology team.
Facilities were gradually moved into the AWS Cloud, initially to solve the urgent capacity and reliability issues, and later to further improve security and support the growth of new and existing systems.
As the partnership matured, Agidea was able to work with Springboard to find the best new cloud technologies to use to improve customer experience and save money.
System stability is now many times better, outages and system pauses have been mostly eliminated. One of the key benefits is that the staff within Springboard are much happier with the system and don’t dread periods of high demand when previously only their heroic effort kept the lights on.
After three years of migrating services, Agidea has been gradually changing the emphasis of their effort. Now moving towards a management role with Springboard, managing change and training in-house staff so they can take over the day-to-day development of the systems.
Agidea will continue to advise on hardware and software architecture and the best AWS services to meet current and future workloads.
Agidea have really helped transform how we develop, organise and plan our IT setup at Springboard. As a result, the business has seen a marked improvement in the quality and performance of our applications and infrastructure. Agidea are always ready to suggest AWS services that best fit the cloud service we require and make sure it works for us.- ,
