Maintaining Flexibility: Grupo Calipso Migration to AWS from On-prem

Managing a business can be tough. Depending on the industry, owners will need to actively track cash, raw materials, production capacity, you name it. And all that time spent tracking takes away from focusing on what really matters: the customer experience.

Because of this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) industry is so large. Companies of all sizes need to efficiently understand how all their moving parts work together, and where things could be optimized. It’s also perhaps unsurprising that the old guard in ERP software aren’t the most agile. B2B management software likely doesn’t come top of mind when thinking of the most innovative verticals.

So, what’s a company to do if they need a highly customizable ERP system? Well, for those in Latin America, there’s Grupo Calipso.

Based out of Buenos Aires, the startup offers a system that was built to modernize the ERP process via flexible frameworks that companies of any size, or in any industry, can use. Business environments change, and owners need to be able to quickly add to or modify their systems to understand the impact. This can be a really heavy lift with other providers, but is just what Grupo Calipso was built for.

The company can trace more than just its founding family’s heritage to the country of Argentina, per Octavio lacub, son of the founder and Head of Development at Grupo Calipso. He emphasizes that the country’s business environment is extremely complex, which is what led his family to prioritize customization from the beginning when building the startup.

That focus on customizability was not being reflected with the startup’s previous infrastructure, however, which led them to make the decision to migrate onto AWS, says Octavio.

“For years we had been using IFX Networks, a local provider that helped us set up an on-prem solution. Things were going alright, but we started to notice our services would intermittently go down. For us, infrastructure is the last thing we need to be worrying about. Our focus is on the product and customer—any time thinking about infrastructure takes away from that.”

After researching the available options, the team at Grupo Calipso chose to migrate to AWS for a more dependable offering and deeper selection of products. As Octavio puts it, “I attended an info session that AWS put on and was really impressed with all of the updated architecture we could have been taking advantage of but weren’t. Microservices, for example, is something we hadn’t even thought about previously but are excited to pick up.”

And the team at Grupo Calipso has still been able to keep their focus on being highly customizable, perhaps even more so. Within a few weeks of migrating, they encountered a customer that needed to increase the size of their database immediately, something that would’ve been difficult and time intensive with Grupo Calipso’s previous provider.

As Octavio puts it, “With AWS we were able to stand up a new database using Amazon RDS for the customer within 7 minutes, which was really impressive. Along with flexibility, the performance insights offered for the database products have also been very interesting. We’re now able to better serve our customers, while seeing details that previously were hidden.”