AWS Case Study: Zen Engineering Network Inc.

Although Zen initially utilized a traditional data-center model, the company moved its primary IT assets to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Currently, Zen is using AWS to host its customer relationship management, ticketing systems, monitoring systems, mail services, and various other systems related to storage repositories and staged application servers. An important factor in Zen’s decision to use AWS was the implementation of Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides scalable and cost-effective data storage and retrieval for Web initiatives of any size.

One of Zen’s key clients is OmniPACS Inc., which provides a global Web-based medical image exchange service called OmniPACS®. The OmniPACS® service allows patients and medical professionals to safely and easily share medical images. In 2008, Zen helped OmniPACS Inc. move from a traditional data center to AWS and in the process created strategic business advantages. “This includes the ability to leverage Amazon’s vast network bandwidth and deployment points—as well as adopt a global servicing model by utilizing centers in the European Union and Asia Pacific,” says OmniPACS Inc.’s CTO Michael Johngren. Today, Zen manages both OmniPACS Inc.’s corporate and service related IT functions through AWS.

The core technologies required for the OmniPACS® service are hosted on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). OmniPACS Inc.’s corporate IT assets, such as wikis, support portals, customer relationship management, and domain name system are also hosted on Amazon EC2. OmniPACS Inc.’s CTO Michael Johngren says, “AWS is the most innovative and advanced cloud computing framework on the market today. It has allowed us to maintain countless strategic business advantages, and every month there are so many new advancements to AWS—that our business just seems to evolve with it.”

In addition to OmniPACS Inc., Zen has helped other organizations migrate from traditional data center environments to AWS in order to benefit from the service’s cost-effective pricing and extensive scalability. In 2009, financial trading firm Flett Futures hired Zen to handle the firm’s transition to AWS in order to escape the scalability limitations and high cost of the firm’s traditional hosting provider. In 2010, publishing company Capstone Digital asked Zen to move its custom applications to AWS. According to Zen, Capstone Digital was particularly attracted to AWS because of its overall flexibility, but also because of Amazon CloudFront, which can integrate with other services within AWS to provide innovative content delivery.

Zen believes in AWS for all of its current cloud computing needs and anticipates continued success and growth with the service in the future. Chris Chua, Chief Operating Officer of Zen says, “There is not a solution today that we don’t put to the Amazon cloud primer and determine the economies of scales that become apparent. Like Microsoft® set the bar for client desktop computing, Amazon has set the bar to what one should expect with an ‘evolved and innovative cloud offering.’”

To learn more, visit http://www.zenengine.net/ .