AWS Case Study: Advanced Innovations
When a company grows rapidly, it can be both a blessing and a curse: a blessing for the bottom-line and a curse for the systems and staff that need manage and maintain that growth. Advanced Innovations, a global orchestrator of design, manufacturing and supply-chain solutions, has achieved 83% growth in 2009 and it’s been able to manage it successfully.
The company, based out of Limerick, Ireland, has made innovative technology its focus, which enables it to meet the needs of its global customers and supply chain and manufacturing partners.
In early 2009, Advanced Innovations (AI) was hosted out of physical servers racked in a 3rd party data center but they knew they needed a more scalable option. Michael Higgins, Chief Technology Officer tells the story, “We looked very closely at other cloud options, then discovered AWS and never looked back. AWS offered outstanding service, outstanding product offering, ease of use, and good pricing.” AI decided to move all new application development to Oracle Fusion Middleware (SOA), primarily because it was available in the cloud. Higgins continues, “The existing relationship between Amazon and Oracle was very helpful – only 23 minutes to start and provision an Oracle database – “not possible” became “push the button”.
AI has deployed its new Oracle technology stack: Oracle Database (Enterprise Edition), Oracle Fusion Middleware (SOA), Oracle Web Center and Oracle Beehive in the AWS cloud. Higgins explains, “We have taken Beehive a step further and are running it as an Extra-Enterprise suite. So, it delivers email to all our users and collaboration services to all our users and all of our Business Partners (customers, manufacturing partners, parts suppliers).” AI is also in the process of moving its legacy stack from hosted physical servers to Amazon EC2, including Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Business Intelligence. Higgins says, “We will then be 100% AWS cloud architecture.” AI also uses EBS disk volumes for persistent instance storage and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring.
AI is using Amazon EC2’s US-East Region. “We have a global footprint of users in Ireland, U.S., and China. We may put up some web centers (http delivery servers) in a proxy model that might include other regions (US-West), but current access and performance data indicates we are doing just fine from US-East.”
Higgins shares the bottom-line benefits of AWS, “The Opex vs. Capex discussion was also a big win, but the clincher was the ability to grow without buying and provisioning servers – what a concept! We have seen cost savings in excess of 70%, no new staff to support new stacks, hundreds of man hours saved each week! Our I/T is 100% outsourced, so not having to provide server engineers, network engineers, security staff, etc., etc., etc. means a lot to us both in costs and management.”
“We could not be where we are today in the deployment of our technology and applications if we had to buy racks/servers, hire staff, increase training and mange our own servers, switches, security protocols, etc.”
Find Advanced Innovations at http://www.advancedinnovationsinc.com 
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