New Case Studies and AWS Partner Success Stories: San Diego Comic-Con, Esri, Intel, Partner Transformation Program

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a global community of partners who leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build, market, and sell customer offerings. AWS Partners are uniquely positioned to help customers take full advantage of all that AWS has to offer and accelerate their journey to the cloud.

This diverse network features more than 100,000 partners from 150+ countries. More than 90% of Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies utilize AWS Partner solutions and services.

We’re excited to share a few stories to help you learn how customers around the world have accelerated their cloud adoption and fueled innovation by working with AWS Partners.

Metal Toad Keeps a Top Comic Site Safe for San-Diego Comic-Con

Superheroes may be up all night foiling supervillains, but who is watching over their websites and protecting them from online evildoers? AWS Partner Metal Toad is proud to take on this responsibility with the help of a powerful “utility belt” delivered by AWS.

Metal Toad has worked with major entertainment brands for decades, including keeping some of the highest-profile media sites live under unique traffic conditions. A major awards site, for example, may have strong traffic year-round, but on the night of a big event their ordinary traffic can look more like a distributed denial of service (DDoS) incident.

Keeping these sites up and running is one of Metal Toad’s superpowers, but the team couldn’t do it without the right infrastructure and tools. As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with the Digital Customer Experience Competency, Metal Toad specializes in leveraging these tools to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

Metal Toad helped its client defend their valuable site during San Diego Comic-Con by defeating over 10,000 malicious traffic events, through the help of Amazon SageMaker and related server infrastructure. Machine learning from AWS allowed the team to find malicious traffic even among a huge volume of legitimate traffic, ensuring the client had consistent uptime and performance throughout the big event.

Vodafone Works with Esri to Build a UK-Wide Digital Twin on AWS

Vodafone, the leading pan-European and African technology communications company, has long relied on Esri‘s geographic information system (GIS) to make data-driven decisions on where to locate cell towers and how to improve its mobile coverage.

When Vodafone decided to move from an on-premises GIS system to a cloud-based Esri ArcGIS Enterprise platform, it looked at the growing volume of data it had and realized it could gain even greater insights by building a full digital twin of its nationwide network.

“Everything we wanted to do was national. Using AWS, we can manage all of that data quickly and easily. We haven’t had a limitation,” says Boris Pitchforth, Lead Architect, GIS and Cloud at Vodafone.

Vodafone undertook the project with Esri, an AWS Select Tier Services Partner, as well as with NTT Data and ROK Technologies. The digital twin has been available since 2021, and the initial target audience was engineers, who are responsible for determining cell tower placement. “It gives them greater insight,” says Pitchforth. “If they’ve got 3D visualizations of all the parameters, they can visualize it very quickly and rapidly assess the impact of environmental factors, such as tree growth, on the network elements.”

Vodafone is now exploring taking the digital twin concept to other markets and integrating data from other organizations—such as utility companies and local councils—to provide even richer location details. Other enhancements include adding machine learning for greater insights and automation.

Intel Accelerates Drug Development for Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) is a nonprofit that collates and organizes the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD)—a catalog of over 1.1 million enhanced small molecule structures. The CSD serves as a vital resource for pharmaceutical development, providing insight into small molecule structural features and properties.

Understanding interactions in the CSD can inform drug discovery because similar types of interactions can occur in structures in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). And as new protein structures are discovered and added to the worldwide data bank, the CCDC uses advanced data-modelling techniques to predict the likelihood of hydrogen bonds and other less classical interactions occurring.

CCDC works with AWS Partner Intel to produce a public-facing database of protein structures with intelligently derived and computationally optimized atomic positions for hydrogen atoms. The CCDC runs curation workflows on Amazon EC2 and uses Intel processors to refine its structural database.

“With the power of Intel and AWS, we’ve essentially eliminated that process, presenting researchers with predictions of protonation states in important protein structures, saving hundreds of thousands of hours of life sciences research time across the globe,” says Jason Cole, Senior Research Fellow at CCDC.

Intel is the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance processors for servers, PCs, IoT devices, and mobile devices. AWS and Intel engineers have worked together for more than 10 years, building custom hardware to ensure AWS services run on a platform optimized for customer workloads for the best value.

Arrow ECS Drives Well-Architected Framework on Code Enigma Workloads

As a leading builder and host of some of Europe’s busiest and most complex websites, Code Enigma wanted to improve efficiency and performance for its customers. With most of those websites running on AWS, Code Enigma knew that applying AWS best practices would be key to unlocking the benefits of the cloud.

Code Enigma worked with AWS Distribution Partner Arrow ECS to review production workloads and adjust them to optimize performance on AWS. Arrow ECS analyzed Code Enigma’s requirements and created a business plan, making recommendations on ways their marketing, services, and AWS operations could be improved.

“I really appreciate the team at Arrow ECS. They’re responsive and keen to support us in whatever way they can,” says David Griffiths, Operations Manager at Code Enigma. “They have a lot of technical experience we can lean on, and have a great understanding of where we can benefit more from AWS’s development offers. It’s exactly the support Code Enigma were looking for as we put more emphasis on the growth of our Managed AWS services.”

Working with Arrow ECS to conduct AWS Well-Architected Reviews and identify potential issues, Code Enigma was able to proactively address risks by more than 50%. In addition, Arrow ECS created a case study with Code Enigma to help improve its market awareness. This reference and its associated marketing efforts, funded by AWS Marketing Development Funds (MDF), helped Code Enigma increase organic leads by 200%, and created an opportunity for a closer working relationship with AWS.

Billennium Drives Growth Through AWS Partner Transformation Program

Billennium, an IT services and solutions company with customers worldwide, participated in the AWS Partner Transformation Program (AWS PTP) to create a new service catalog for customers, advance its AWS collaboration, and drive new business growth.

Billennium approached the AWS PTP like it does all projects, with internal processes and project management procedures in place. The company relied on AWS Partner SyncOrg to provide a 100-day plan including PTP-specific guidelines that defined roles and responsibilities, high-level tasks, and project timelines.

Throughout the program, more than a dozen Billennium employees from the sales, marketing, security, and solution delivery departments met three times each week to evaluate project goals and timelines. Smaller teams of program managers and goal owners met daily, following the project structure initially created by SyncOrg.

“Once we participated in the AWS Partner Transformation Program, we gained insight into better serving our customers. This will make our business stronger as we continue to grow,” says Łukasz Stypułkowski, Channel Executive at Billennium.

By completing the AWS PTP, Billennium achieved its goal of advancing its AWS relationship. The company is now an AWS Select Partner and became an AWS Public Sector Partner, which will help the it drive new business growth. “Becoming an AWS Public Sector Partner will give us more credibility in the public sector, which is important because we are increasingly working with customers in that space,” Stypułkowski says.

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