Eviden Builds Rapidly Scalable Solution for Likezero on AWS

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.

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.”