AWS Case Study: Grupo Santillana

Initially launched in Mexico, Sistema Uno Internacional delivers Santillana’s educational books to 238 schools in the country. The project currently reaches 65,000 students and 4,500 teachers, who access the educational content using iPads provided by Santillana.

They also have access to other educational-related information through Sistema Uno’s web portal, where school managers, parents, and other stakeholders interact and monitor the learning process.

The Business Challenges

Sergio Quadros, Santillana Brazil General Manager, notes that Grupo Santillana was looking for a solution to enable the project to go live in a short timeframe. Quadros explains, “Working with several teams in different countries, we needed a reliable infrastructure that could be launched very quickly and would scale as the project grew. Plus, we needed to fit that in the project budget.”

Why Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) turned out to be the solution that best met all these requirements. Quadros says, “The use of AWS was one of the key factors that enabled the project to go live in such a short time frame. Using Lumis Portal, we knew we could develop the whole solution in a very fast and dynamic way, designing workflows for the approval of content and development stages.”

The Business Benefits

Quadros describes the details of Grupo Santillana’s solution: “We used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) servers to create three isolated environments, supporting the whole development-testing-deployment cycle. All monitoring and management processes take place on AWS servers, providing great agility and robustness to our solutions. We intensively use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) resources, to run backup routines and replicate data over different cloud fronts, to obtain maximum reliability because we are running core applications for our business model.

“The core application is Sistema Uno’s web portal, which was developed on Lumis Portal, a Java-based portal platform. It provides access to many other applications such as a common directory (developed in PHP) and an external learning management system (LMS).”

The system currently runs 20 Amazon EC2 server instances, among all three environments, supporting up to 8,000 accesses per minute.

The development team has appreciated Amazon Web Services contribution. Quadros comments, “Amazon Web Services allows us to achieve great agility and flexibility in managing the customer’s infrastructure, while offering a very reliable and stable environment.” Quadros adds, “We will surely expand the use of AWS solutions as we scale up and expand the scope of the project.”

To learn more, visit http://www.santillana.com/en/ .

Added June 14, 2012