Feature Story

Hear from other customers

• Crisalix S.A.
  “Our customers highly appreciate that we work on AWS, which is recognized as the most reliable solution on the market.” —Jaime Garcia, PhD, CEO, Crisalix

  The number one question in nearly every plastic surgery or medical aesthetic consultation is, “How would I look after the procedure?” For over 10 years, Crisalix S.A. (Crisalix) has developed technology to help plastic surgeons and patients answer this question. Customers can upload standard pictures to its solution to create a 3D model that simulates virtually any plastic or cosmetic procedure. By helping patients visualize the potential outcomes, Crisalix empowers them to make more confident decisions while surgeons educate and inform them on the proper procedures.

  Founded in Switzerland, healthcare professionals worldwide trust Crisalix, and its solution is used in renowned medical companies, hospitals, and clinics on a global scale. The company requires a secure, scalable, and highly available cloud provider to host its mobile application and best serve its global customers and their patients. To meet these requirements, Crisalix turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

  Crisalix uses highly scalable AWS services like Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which is used to define and launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network, and AWS Global Accelerator, a networking service that improves the availability, performance, and security of public applications. Using these solutions, Crisalix can reach customers and patients around the world and expand to new regions on demand. Because AWS services are also highly available, the company’s mobile service is accessible 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.

  Additionally, Crisalix has adopted GPU instances on AWS to provide the compute capacity necessary to develop deep learning algorithms and deliver more advanced visualization results to patients around the world. For production, it uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3.2xlarge instances, which accelerate machine learning and high-performance computing applications with powerful GPUs. To power its staging environment, Crisalix relies on Amazon EC2 G4dn.xlarge instances, the industry’s most cost-effective and versatile GPU instances for machine learning inference and graphics-intensive applications.

  On AWS, Crisalix has achieved the availability and scalability necessary to reach a global audience. Since adopting AWS services, the company has not encountered any connectivity or availability issues, nor has it experienced any downtime. It is clear that Crisalix’s customers are satisfied with the mobile app.

• Dentsu Tracking
  “The program was facilitated by using the scalable and secure AWS Cloud. Using serverless technologies on AWS, dentsu Tracking explored new design possibilities to overcome immense scalability requirements.” —Mario Mira, vice president of engineering and operations, dentsu Tracking

  As many as 1 in 10 cigarette and tobacco products sold worldwide are estimated to be illicit. These products lead to societal impacts ranging from a higher rate of youth consumption—because illicit products are typically lower priced—to billions in lost tax revenue resulting from duty evasion.

  Dentsu Tracking (dentsu), a Switzerland-based provider of digital supply chain solutions, is helping to stop illicit trade in tobacco with its pioneering technology. Dentsu operates the world’s largest tracking and tracing system for the tobacco supply chain, serving the European Union and United Kingdom. A report by the Observatory of Public Sector Innovation estimates that this system could reduce the circulation of illicit goods by up to 20 percent and solve problems such as tobacco product theft, underdeclaration, and fiscal evasion.

  But first, dentsu had to meet immense scalability requirements. Achieving complete visibility into the tobacco supply chain means tracking and tracing 30 billion items—and close to 100 billion unique identifiers—in real time every year. Dentsu’s system needed to process big data reliably and cost effectively, and the company wanted to avoid the burden of infrastructure management.

  To design a system that would meet its need for big data management on a global scale, dentsu used serverless technology on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The solution features various AWS solutions, including Amazon Redshift, the most widely used cloud data warehouse, and AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it simple to discover, prepare, and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development.

  Using AWS, dentsu can now deliver highly scalable solutions cost effectively and without the complexity and burden of managing infrastructure in-house. The company also achieved audit-friendly solutions on AWS and successfully passed its ISO 27001 audits, reducing by at least 50 percent its cost to pass these audits. Dentsu can also deliver value to its customers three times faster. By providing timely insights into the tobacco supply chain, the company is empowering its customers to stop the trade of illicit cigarette and tobacco products.

• Hotel-Spider
  “Using AWS, we as a software-as-a-service company can focus fully on delivering hospitality software solutions without worrying about the complexity, time, and cost of server and network management.” —Marco Baurdoux, CEO, Hotel-Spider

  With the hospitality industry in a constant state of flux, industry companies need tools that can adapt quickly to the market’s changing needs. Hotel-Spider, a Switzerland-based hospitality distribution platform, helps hotels optimize their online bookings. The platform brings together data—including the number of available rooms, prices, policies, reservations, modifications, and cancellations—and software solutions that help hotels make and manage reservations across various sales channels.

  In the hospitality industry, factors such as seasonality and daily operating cycles lead to fluctuations in the amount of data exchanged by a hotel’s systems. To handle these fluctuations, Hotel-Spider needed a solution that could perform well during peak workloads while minimizing costs during off-peak periods. The software company also wanted to spend more time developing its innovative solutions and less time managing servers and networks.

  To achieve the scalable infrastructure and cost optimization that it needed, Hotel-Spider chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its highly scalable offerings, ready-to-use services, and customer-oriented approach.

  To process data at scale, Hotel-Spider uses AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets users run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers. The company also uses Amazon API Gateway—a fully managed service that makes it simple for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at virtually any scale—as part of its solution for handling fluctuating data volumes. To cost-effectively store and manage data, Hotel-Spider uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

  Hotel-Spider can now seamlessly scale to handle between 800,000 and 1.9 million requests per day. The company has gained virtually limitless storage using Amazon S3 and finds it more manageable to retain the log files generated by data exchanges.

• Innoveo
  “In particular, AWS made it possible for us to focus on our core business by helping us solve hard problems utilizing AWS services like Amazon RDS and others to build, manage and scale highly available clusters across regions.” —Suren Karavettil, chief product officer, Innoveo

  Companies in the financial services and insurance industries—highly competitive markets—frequently launch and test new products so that they stand out from the competition. Global technology company Innoveo provides clients in these markets with a no-code platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution that they can use to build modern applications simply and cost effectively without business teams needing to depend on their IT teams or manage infrastructure.

  Innoveo offers its no-code PaaS—built on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—to over 30 customers in the insurance, financial services, healthcare, and service industries globally. Clients launch services, such as a digital underwriting workbench or automated workflows, from a simple user interface, with the backend running on high-speed, highly available, and highly scalable services on AWS. Customers also have access to the latest technologies on AWS, such as Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that automatically extracts text, handwriting, and data from scanned documents.

  To build its solution infrastructure, Innoveo uses managed services from AWS, such as Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL—a service to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Using AWS, Innoveo customers save money by cutting the up-front costs of infrastructure and application development and shifting their operating model to an operational expenditure structure.

  Innoveo can set up environments in different regions—including Europe, the United States, Asia Pacific, and soon the United Arab Emirates and China—while satisfying privacy requirements such as the General Data Protection Regulation. Innoveo uses Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a service to define and launch AWS resources in a logically isolated virtual network, which gives Innoveo full control over the virtual networking environment, including resource placement, connectivity, and security.

  Using AWS, the Innoveo PaaS accelerates time to market, with customers launching new products and services in as little as 5 weeks instead of months. Customers don’t need to worry about maintenance and servicing needs for their environments because the solution is managed by Innoveo and AWS. Using AWS, Innoveo helps customers stay on the cutting edge of technology using a fraction of the resources that they would otherwise need to set up and maintain infrastructure.

• INOLAWYER
  “We selected AWS due to its wide range of comprehensive tools, usability, and global reputation.” —Simon Urbach, CEO, INOLAWYER

  INOLAWYER AG (INOLAWYER) seeks to use advanced technology to help its clients solve complex legal problems. The software provider—based in Zurich, Switzerland—connects clients with a growing network of independent lawyers and law firms. INOLAWYER also offers a complete software solution to help law firms, attorneys, trustees, and other service providers manage client information, organize documents, and better oversee their cases.

  Running such an expansive service requires flexibility, scalability, and reliability. From the outset, the team at INOLAWYER knew that it needed to build its solution on the cloud to gain agility, accelerate innovation, and better connect clients with legal experts.

  In 2018, INOLAWYER chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) to power its software-as-a-service solution and built its first minimum viable product that same year. The company chose AWS so that it could access the cloud tools that it needed to support its core application and quickly build innovative features, such as customer relationship management, invoice reconciliation, and other services required for Swiss lawyers and law firms.

  INOLAWYER hosts and runs its service on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For data storage, the company uses Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), a simple-to-use, scalable, high-performance block-storage service. To manage its domains, INOLAWYER relies on Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable Domain Name System web service.

  By building its innovative service on AWS, INOLAWYER has gained the scalability and reliability that it needs to connect clients to legal experts. The company can quickly onboard new lawyers and law firms to help address complex cases, diversifying its network and connecting its clients with more areas of legal expertise. With its cloud-based solution on AWS, INOLAWYER has access to innovative technologies that it can use to develop new applications and further enhance its services as it continues to evolve.

• iolo
  “We have saved investment and numerous hours by using AWS services for our IoT and internal IT infrastructure.” —Thierry Hayoz, CEO, iolo AG

  With the advent of smart home technology, people are interacting with the devices in their homes in new and exciting ways. iolo AG wants to revolutionize the smart home experience using Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Based in Murten, Switzerland, the startup has developed a smart home and energy-management technology called dingz. The user-friendly product is designed to help customers track their energy consumption and control lights, blinds, heating, audio systems, and other smart devices.

  In 2020, iolo AG sought a scalable, advanced infrastructure to deploy its dingz product and turned to a suite of scalable and managed Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions that would free the company to spend its time on developing new value for the business and its customers.

  The company adopted AWS IoT services like AWS IoT Core, a service that lets users connect billions of IoT devices and route trillions of messages to AWS services without managing infrastructure. iolo AG has also configured its devices to incorporate Amazon Alexa to provide voice control for a seamless customer experience.

  Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), iolo AG accesses secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. For database services, the company uses Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed, serverless, key-value NoSQL database designed to run high-performance applications at virtually any scale.

  By using AWS services to manage its IoT infrastructure, iolo AG has improved its time to market and saved time and internal resources while using state-of-the-art technologies. The startup has saved 4–6 months by adopting AWS services for its dingz IoT infrastructure compared with deploying, configuring, and managing the infrastructure by itself. Gaining the scalability and capabilities that it needs means the company can deliver innovative solutions to its customers. Its developers can spin up new infrastructure in seconds and have more time to focus on value-generating activities, like application and end-user features development.

  iolo AG no longer needs to commit extensive resources to scale its IoT infrastructure. Because AWS services can scale up and down on demand, the company can quickly provision new capacity as its customer base and smart home network grow. iolo AG uses AWS across its business activities, from conducting marketing campaigns to building an internal web application.

• JobDone
  “Being able to focus on development and improving the customer experience rather than infrastructure maintenance is a big win for us.” —Lucky Bassi, cofounder and CEO, JobDone

  Today’s workplaces live in a world of rapid change. Employers are constantly searching for solutions to help them move fast and seamlessly adapt to any unexpected events. To support modern workplaces, JobDone offers a centralized software-as-a-service tool where employers and employees can create schedules, communicate with their teams, and perform other essential functions to keep their workplaces running smoothly.

  In line with its commitment to workplace productivity, JobDone strives to deliver a fast, high-performing solution to its customers. The Swiss-based software-as-a-service startup needed highly scalable cloud infrastructure that it could use to launch new features quickly and accelerate its development cycles. To meet these goals and facilitate future growth, JobDone adopted fully managed solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and put them into production in April 2022.

  To spin up a reliable storage layer for its microservices architecture, JobDone uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Along with Amazon RDS, JobDone uses Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system built for the cloud. The company also uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed container service that runs and scales Kubernetes applications in the cloud, to run containers for various workloads with different requirements.

  Using AWS solutions, JobDone has unlocked a new level of scalability and performance. It can quickly scale up to support new workloads and scale back as needed. Because AWS services are fully managed, JobDone no longer needs to focus on managing its infrastructure; instead, its employees can focus on building new features and deploying innovative solutions to delight its customers. In fact, JobDone has reduced DevOps engagement by 30 percent compared with its previous cloud infrastructure.

• Simpego
  “AWS technology helps us iterate quicker and improve our services—whether it’s customer journeys or new features in our product offering. Over time, we have moved more of our services to AWS, which gives us access to a breadth of serverless solutions, thereby improving our innovative power.” —Michael Ammann, chief underwriting officer and chief data scientist, Simpego

  Switzerland’s fastest growing insuretech startup and fully licensed insurance Simpego understands that identifying what its customers and partners want is the key to establishing its position in a highly competitive industry. Since its founding in 2016, Simpego has invested in the latest cloud technologies, using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help it advance its data science capabilities, drive enterprise-wide agility, and reduce its carbon footprint.

  Simpego relies on predictive insights from machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence to launch new products and services and strategically enhance the customer experience. The company is also committed to digitizing its insurance processes as much as possible. To support these efforts, the company built a robust, scalable infrastructure on AWS and adopted several data storage solutions that help it simplify data management.

  Using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service built to retrieve any amount of data—Simpego built a data lake to store its data at scale and deepen its ML capabilities. For advanced analytics, the company uses Amazon Athena, an interactive query service that makes it simple to analyze data in Amazon S3. By relying on cloud storage solutions, Simpego accesses its data quickly and automatically and unlocks insights that drive innovation and decision-making.

  Simpego prepares its data for training its ML models using AWS Glue, which provides companies with the ability to discover, prepare, and integrate all their data at virtually any scale. Using this service, Simpego avoids data siloes, which in turn keeps its solution open to rapidly onboard new partners with standardized processes and APIs, providing insurance services powered by ML and artificial intelligence to entire systems. To maximize efficiency, the insurance company containerized its workloads using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), which is a highly trusted way to start, run, and scale Kubernetes. By building clusters on AWS, Simpego controlled compute costs as it expanded to become Switzerland’s ninth largest car insurer.

  By adopting a cloud-first strategy, Simpego can continually optimize its stack so that the company yields an excellent customer experience. According to Fintech News Switzerland, Simpego was voted one of the top Swiss fintech startups of 2020, with its wide variety of customizable, flexible insurance options. A year later, the company’s sales totaled 34.4 million CHF—almost four times that of 2019.

  With a secure, robust set of cloud solutions, Simpego has positioned the company for further growth.

• Wallee
  “Using AWS services, we have become PCI DSS compliant in a cost-efficient way. This is primarily because AWS offers key services without which you cannot achieve the compliance requirements.” —Thomas Hunziker, chief information officer, Wallee

  Wallee AG (Wallee) is the home of payments for Swiss banks and merchants of all sizes. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, the company makes it simple to set up, accept, and manage payments across channels, including online payments, vending machines, and physical terminals. Wallee also provides automated accounting services, integrated check-out interfaces, and personalized customer experiences.

  To operate its omnichannel payment gateway, Wallee must comply with strict Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requirements. PCI DSS compliance is necessary for merchants to accept credit card payments, which is a critical component of Wallee’s business. The company achieved PCI DSS compliance by adopting solutions from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2015.

  Wallee uses several AWS services to power its primary application, including AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. Additionally, the company uses AWS services to achieve key PCI DSS compliance requirements, such as using Amazon CloudWatch, a monitoring and observability service, to provide an immutable log of transactions. Wallee also facilitates secure data encryption using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), which lets developers create, manage, and control cryptographic keys across internal applications and more than 100 AWS services.

  On AWS, Wallee has achieved PCI DSS compliance without needing to build its own infrastructure or solutions from scratch, saving time and money for its business. It has been able to grow from 15 employees to 120 employees since adopting AWS solutions. Additionally, it has increased revenue by a factor of 8 in just 3 years.