Founded in 1995, Smartronix is an end-to-end solution provider who offers a range of services for enterprise customers on Amazon Web Services (AWS), including professional services and managed services. Smartronix works closely with a large number of enterprise customers across the globe, providing innovative and secure solutions through the team’s in-depth experience in global and complex enterprise environments and mission-critical engineering capabilities. Some of the industries the company focuses on include healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, public sector and construction manufacturing. Smartronix has been working with AWS since 2007 and has been a part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) since program inception in 2012, where it participates as an APN Premier Consulting Partner with the Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange Competencies.
For nearly 20 years, Smartronix has delivered a wide breadth of services to enterprise customers in highly regulated industries. For example, since inception the organization has worked closely with an expansive base of federal customers. Through this experience, the Smartronix team developed a deep level of expertise in security, operations, networking, and workload management best practices for customers in on-premise environments.
As Smartronix continued to develop its end-to-end expertise and expand its customer base, the leadership team anticipated the potential in delivering highly available, highly scalable and secure solutions to customers on a public cloud infrastructure platform. While private cloud deployments were an option for the company, Sean McCarron, Vice President of Sales explains, “We needed the agility and the rapid provisioning available on AWS,” and Robert Groat, Executive Vice President of Technology and Strategy, states, “We wanted to provide our large enterprise customers with end-to-end solutions at scale and AWS gave us that ability.”
The Smartronix team made the decision to take their extensive Enterprise IT services expertise and skillsets in management and optimization of mission-critical workloads to AWS where they could explore cloud-based solutions for enterprise customers. “AWS was the clear market leader, just as it is now,” says Groat. McCarron explained that AWS’s agnostic approach to operating systems was critical for Smartronix: “The ability for us to have control over the operating system and for us to be able to add compensating controls as needed for the environments we needed to work in was very important.”
When Smartronix first began working with AWS, it primarily focused on research and development (R&D) projects. Its first large-scale opportunity on AWS came in 2009. “We had a 12-week timeframe where we needed to create an entire reporting infrastructure for the Recovery Act, a $787 billion dollar recovery funding act. In order for us to meet those deadlines, we needed to have infrastructure provisioned and ready for us on day one of the contract. We’d been working with AWS; we’d met with internal AWS teams on different initiatives. However, this was our first major contract with AWS. We ended up building that out and had significant success,” says Groat. With this initial project, Smartronix became the first provider to utilize the AWS platform to deliver services to a federal agency. “We ended up completely shuttering the physical data center and going with an active-active configuration on AWS for Recovery.gov, and within a few months of that success, we had three federal financial agencies for who we were doing significant work on the AWS Cloud. This translated into more work in the financial space and commercial space,” Groat explains.
Since then, Smartronix has designed and implemented solutions of massive scale on AWS for their diverse customer base. As examples, Smartronix has several customers in the media and entertainment space, ranging from highly popular online magazines to mobile services for national sports leagues. One particular customer scales from a few dozen server resources during normal operations up to 1500 on game days, while serving petabytes of video streaming data per month. “No other cloud service can provide the type of immediate elasticity that these customers require,” says McCarron.
Smartronix has extensive experience working across a breadth of technologies and deployment models to support customers as they design, build and run their critical applications on AWS. These applications are often built on Smartronix’s managed infrastructure platform and provide customers with a completely managed AWS cloud environment, plus scalable, elastic resources and a stack tuned for their specific business requirements. Beyond working with customers to develop their cloud strategy and roadmap, through to migration and implementation, Smartronix’s current portfolio of managed applications and services for customers includes:
- Managed SharePoint on AWS
- Managed Exchange on AWS
- Managed SQL Server 2012 on AWS
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- WordPress
- Alfresco
- Drupal
- Sitecore
- SharePoint FIS
- Chef, Puppet, Jenkins
- Cassandra, Mongo, Hadoop
- Custom Applications
Today, Smartronix leverages a wide breadth of AWS services when working with customers, including:
- Multiple Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) instance families;
- Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Glacier for customer Disaster Recovery and Archival solutions;
- Amazon Route 53 and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB) to distribute load at massive scale; and
- AWS CloudFormation and AWS CloudTrail to automate, track and audit deployments and use for customers
The Smartronix team is seeing impressive growth and demand from its customer base around Amazon WorkSpaces and Amazon WorkDocs and looks forward to launching a number of customer solutions that include those products in the very near future.
“Working with AWS has transformed our company in terms of our focus and our investments,” says Groat. The company’s internal staff has grown from a handful of subject matter experts in 2008, to over 100 trained AWS Cloud professionals entering 2015. Smartronix has found AWS’s open lines of communication and responsiveness and feedback from the various AWS products teams as a big benefit of working with AWS. “The close communication that we’ve been able to have with AWS products teams to drive our requests, and their responsiveness to our requests, has benefited us and our customer base,” says Groat.
Over the past six years of delivering services on AWS, Smartronix has seen continual and rapid growth in revenue year-over-year. By providing customers with an extensive managed service offering on AWS, Smartronix enables customers to focus less on the day-to-day running and management of their applications and operations and more on what’s core to their business. Smartronix’s client base now includes several Fortune 100 and 500 firms, including leaders in healthcare, life sciences, financial services industries, media and entertainment franchises and dozens of Department of Defense customers, including several of the largest federal government agencies.
Across the board, Smartronix says that customers have described reduced time to market and total cost of ownership reductions, allowing for successful migrations of entire data center operations (several hundred servers) into AWS in under six weeks. Further, “Our customers have publicly described cost savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The total savings compound over time as our customers recognize the value of having a dynamic and elastic platform that enables them to deliver services faster and more effectively,” says McCarron.
AWS’s global reach has enabled Smartronix to expand into new markets and reach new industries rapidly. “The global reach of AWS has allowed us to expand our reach at a pace that couldn’t have been achieved before. It gives us the ability to touch customers that we may not have had access to historically,” says McCarron.
In 2015 and beyond, Smartronix plans to continue to increase the number of certified and accredited AWS Cloud professionals on staff as the company grows. Organizationally, Smartronix will continue to invest in growing out its services portfolio on AWS and further expand on its relationship with AWS. “The rapid pace with which AWS operates is unique in the industry,” says McCarron. As AWS continues to deliver to market new services that benefit customers of all sizes, Smartronix will continue shaping those services into solutions that can benefit customers.
Smartronix will also be working closely with clients to further help them address and identify the potential of what can be achieved on the AWS Cloud. “This includes working with client leadership to understand the value proposition and true benefits, and working with software development and product teams to assess, rationalize and ultimately expand into an agile development environment that has the ability to push value to end customers continuously, consistently and rapidly,” exlpains McCarron.
To learn more about Smartronix, visit the company's Directory listing here.