How One Small Business Launched Products Twice as Fast Because of the Cloud

Ambitious small and medium businesses (SMBs) know the importance of modernizing their systems—it can help them better serve customers, understand trends, and enhance security to name just a few benefits. Brazil-based software firm 4Asset is a provider of software solutions and tools for customers working with the territorial and socio-environmental regulatory processes of land management. They partnered with Amazon Web Services to develop a plan for modernizing and scaling their company, enabling faster deployment, and ensuring a stronger security. We talked with 4Asset’s Director of Products and Technology, Maurício Fiorese, about the company’s cloud journey.

Working with AWS to leverage data and establish the conditions for growth

Founded in 2018, 4Asset now has around 40 employees. When it decided to seek out a collaboration with AWS, 4Asset had set itself ambitious goals for growth. “Our goal for the coming year was to double our sales,” said Maurício Fiorese. “Our challenge was modernizing our systems. We wanted to build systems using a lot of resources in terms of innovation and to develop in a faster and more secure way.”

Like many SMBs, 4Asset also looked to the cloud as a way to improve the firm’s capabilities in data management and analytics. “We work with a very high volume of data…and the challenge is to use this information to bring insights, generate more knowledge, and put intelligence on top of it to deliver additional value to the client,” Fiorese said. “The great we challenge we had was to consolidate this data that is spread out in several places, whether in our databases or in files, and bring it together to create additional knowledge for customer decision-making assistance.” Ultimately, 4Asset decided to bring in AWS to work on all of these priorities.

Addressing business outcomes and better talent retention

The first priority for 4Asset in their cooperation with AWS was to build better security measures. The company also began leveraging cloud-based solutions and processing power to offer more efficient solutions to customers conducting field research. Over time, the relationship between 4Asset and AWS grew closer, as Fiorese explained, “About a year ago, we joined the AWS Partner Network (APN), and I think that made a big difference, especially in terms of training our team,” Fiorese explained. Now 4Asset regularly uses the training and other benefits provided by APN. “Our shared value of customer focus contributes to our alignment with AWS,” he said. “AWS’s obsession with customers, such as account management, and their availability to talk about opportunities, enables us to better satisfy our customers.”

The migration to AWS has also helped 4Asset internally by making the company more able to retain talented developers. “AWS has these technologies that are highly sought after in the market, and this makes our employees excited to work with this technology. The training we offer, mainly through AWS programs, makes them more satisfied and engaged in our business,” Fiorese said.

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Satisfying customers with rapid deployment into the future

As a result of its cloud journey, 4Asset is now able to achieve a much faster time-to-market. “Today, we are able to launch products and new features much faster than before. I can venture to say that it is even twice as fast,” Fiorese noted. “We can use resources that were formerly very complicated to use, such as the applied artificial intelligence, image recognition, and video recognition, and apply it very quickly. The time for us to develop and deliver to the customer is absurdly faster than we had before AWS.” This means that 4Asset can move much quicker to understand its users’ needs, develop a given functionality, and then deliver it. “As a result, we have happier customers,” he said.

4Asset expects to cooperate more with AWS in the future, particularly on AI and advanced analytics. In Fiorese’s view, other technology SMBs should also consider working with AWS to future-proof their operations. “I believe you should focus on modernizing your applications in a robust way, in a sustainable way, and in a secure way. AWS can collaborate with you on this aspect and train you to use its immense range of resources,” he said.

“AWS is a provider that will be concerned with your business, helping you to modernize your applications and develop solutions, each time being innovative and with increasingly advanced solutions that meet customer needs.”

Next steps

By partnering with AWS, 4Asset has been able to make its business more innovative and sustainable. This small Brazilian business uses the same type of technology as much larger businesses so they can better compete in the market. With AWS, 4Asset only pays for what they need to keep costs efficient. Learn more about how we can help tech SMBs innovate and grow.