AWS Case Study: Model Metrics

Model Metrics built their CardLasso product on AWS. CardLasso has been featured in publications such as Information Week and it allows users to take a picture of a business card using a web cam or an iPhone and have the data automatically transcribed and returned to them as a VCard or CSV file. CardLasso is built on AWS and utilizes S3 for Image Storage, EC2 for Image processing, DevPay for Billing, and Mechanical Turk for transcription of data found in the business card image to usable information.

For Salesforce.com, the leader in Cloud-based CRM with over 60,000 customers worldwide, and its customer base, Model Metrics developed the Cloud Converter. Cloud Converter is an open source application that automates the migration of applications from on premise platforms to Force.com. As a part of the rollout of Cloud Converter, salesforce.com is including the solution in a large marketing initiative to thousands of customers to encourage them to try their Force.com offering.

In the initial rollout of Cloud Converter, salesforce.com needed the application hosted where it could scale to handle tens of thousands of users and be live within 3 weeks. Model Metrics recommended utilizing EC2 in order to quickly provision servers and also have an environment that could grow to meet the large anticipated demand.

Ariel Kelman, Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce.com said, “The fact that Model Metrics utilized EC2 to host this application gave us the confidence that it could handle our volume requirements and we were very impressed with how quickly they were able to get this up and running to meet a very aggressive marketing schedule”.

Model Metrics has also seen a need over its 1,000+ projects for a simple and inexpensive solution to provide on-going data integration services for clients. Although there are a lot of available tools that perform ETL type activities, they typically require one or more servers that have to reside behind a company’s firewall and also have expensive on-going software licensees. Model Metrics developed Cloud Loader as a free AMI that utilizes open source tools, but is fully scripted and configured to handle a variety of integration situations. Since its launch, Cloud Loader has been used by a variety of organizations to move data into or out of back-end source systems with SaaS-based applications.

Model Metrics is headquartered in Chicago with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Minneapolis and Dallas. Model Metrics’ customer base spans all industries and includes enterprises such as Abbot, Allstate, Aon, Cars.com, CME Group, Honeywell, InfoUSA, MasterCard, Medtronic, Morton Salt, and Orbitz. http://www.modelmetrics.com/ .