Partner Success with AWS / Financial Services / United Kingdom
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Eviden Builds Rapidly Scalable Solution for Likezero on AWS
Learn how Eviden and AWS built a working system for Likezero with near-instant scalability for faster onboarding and low-touch management in just 2 months.
92%
faster commissioning of infrastructure
60%
reduction in application support costs
66%
lower database costs
Overview
Likezero is a UK-based agreement intelligence software company, spun out of professional services company PwC. Its legal agreement application previously ran on PwC’s private network, and is also hosted by two major partners—the London Stock Exchange and S&P Global. Likezero needed a new cloud-based solution after the company became independent from PwC, so it turned to AWS Partner Eviden to help it run its service for customers on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Eviden developed a highly scalable system for Likezero on AWS in 2 months.
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Opportunity | Previous Provider’s Shortcomings Required Fast Solution
Likezero provides a sophisticated software solution to digitize and automate the analysis of legal agreements and highlight risks and dependencies for financial institutions. The company is growing fast and increasing revenues by 100 percent annually. This means that it needs an infrastructure that can quickly scale to meet increased demand. Its independence from PwC meant that it needed to find a new place to house its application.
Likezero’s technology requirements have two distinct components—a compute-intensive onboarding stage followed by a business-as-usual stage with less need for heavy compute capability. Onboarding and starting work with a new customer requires a big spike in compute capability because Likezero deals with the thousands of legacy agreements that a typical customer has, many dating back years. A key objective for Likezero was to make the onboarding stage faster and easier to run. The company initially chose another cloud provider but found that this supplier could not protect data, update security certificates, nor support its customers to the level it wanted. It had to move fast to find a new technology solution.
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It’s all about the people—obviously, they have the expertise we need, but we really value the relationship.”
Paul Chlapik
CTO, Likezero
Solution | Scalability Supports Likezero Two-Step Solution
Onboarding requires a large amount of initial compute power to run optical character recognition (OCR) and other machine learning (ML) processing tasks. To optimize this resource-intensive process and to speed up onboarding, Likezero turned to Eviden and AWS—the two had been very close runners-up during the original procurement process. The team, made up of a principal cloud architect and a senior cloud systems developer, used Terraform infrastructure as code (IaC) to deploy a landing zone and governance rules. This infrastructure had required 3–4 weeks to set up a new customer infrastructure using the previous partner’s on-premises hardware. Working with AWS and Eviden allowed Likezero to get systems up and running and ready for new customers in just 2 months. Likezero also appreciated the agility of both companies as they were able to respond to the changing short-term goals of a startup.
After onboarding, Likezero’s clients are transitioned into a business-as-usual state after the initial ingesting and digitization of the clients’ backload of agreements is completed. This stage typically doesn’t require a high compute capability, which is only needed when the customer adds significant volumes of new documents into the application. Spinning up this compute infrastructure to upload documents, then spinning it down again was so labor intensive that the application’s performance would often be negatively affected. After a customer is onboarded and business is running as usual, there is a greater need for database use—both input and output—but much less need for compute power. All this infrastructure work was previously a major manual task for Likezero—but another area that it knew Eviden and AWS could optimize. Eviden used Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to help Likezero manage its infrastructure. Eviden also migrated Likezero’s databases from Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to Amazon Aurora to help reduce costs by enabling the application to scale more effectively for higher compute tasks when needed.
Likezero is a small team of about 45 people and needed a partner with the infrastructure expertise it lacked and was good to work with. “It’s all about the people—obviously, they have the expertise we need, but we really value the relationship—and it’s been really consistent, which is not always true of technology partners,” says Paul Chlapik, chief information officer (CIO) at Likezero. “They were also great at dealing with a customer that didn’t really know what they wanted or needed. We’re experiencing rapid growth as a company, so the goals are constantly moving. Eviden brings the expertise we need. They found us an excellent enterprise architect who really got what we do. They understood the steps we needed to take to get to where we needed to be quickly.”
Outcome | Transformative Move is Now Optimizing Costs
The migration to AWS has been transformative for Likezero. Using IaC to deploy infrastructure now takes just 10 minutes, compared with 3–4 weeks previously. “Using Amazon ECS means the infrastructure mostly looks after itself, autoscaling to meet demand with auto-failover in response to most of our DR scenarios. Auto-deployment of the application alone has removed our most expensive support activity”, says Chlapik.
Likezero and Eviden are still working to optimize costs, but they have already made good progress. Amazon RDS costs—previously more than 50 percent of monthly expenses—have fallen to 17 percent with the switch to Amazon Aurora. This is a 66 percent reduction in database costs. “AWS has a lot of capabilities, and working with Eviden has helped us see how to get the most benefit while minimizing costs,” says Chlapik. The two companies are now working on what they call “shrinking the pilot light.” Currently, application instances still require four or five CPUs even when systems are almost idle. Reducing this would be another opportunity for Likezero to save costs.
About Likezero
UK-based Likezero delivers real-time, contextualized contract intelligence to financial institutions to enhance decision making and reduce risk. Since 2018, it has helped banks deal with major regulatory changes like Brexit and Libor reforms. It has analyzed over 20 million agreements for existing customers and can ingest, analyze, and provide data access to new documents in less than 30 minutes.
About AWS Partner Eviden
Eviden is a global, cloud-native digital services company created by Atos Group in 2023. It helps enterprises accelerate digital transformation through successful cloud migrations, as well as data and cybersecurity transformation. Its 47,000 employees, who work across 14 offices in eight countries around the world, have built a depth and breadth of expertise in applying modern cloud technologies.
AWS Services Used
Amazon ECS
Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) is a fully managed container orchestration service that helps you to more efficiently deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
Amazon RDS
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) is an easy-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership.
Amazon Aurora
Amazon Aurora provides unparalleled high-performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility, at 1/10th the cost of commercial databases.
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