Intuit on AWS

Nhung Ho, head of data science at Intuit Quickbooks, discusses how the financial and tax-preparation software company uses AWS to better serve its customers. Intuit is all in on AWS and uses Amazon SageMaker to train its machine-learning models quickly and at scale, cutting the time needed to deploy the models by 90 percent.

Mint.com was originally hosted in an internal data center, but the team needed to improve its ability to scale up or down to meet peak traffic demands. “We see a minimum 200 percent increase in website traffic immediately after January 1 each year,” says Sean McCluskey, director of application development and cloud operations for Intuit. “We wanted to be able to scale up for that peak load automatically without spending a lot of time and money acquiring and provisioning new servers every time.”

When the lease for the on-premises environment running its TurboTax AnswerXchange application was due, the enterprise decided to move the application to AWS. As a result, Intuit was able to reduce costs by a factor of six because it no longer had to maintain idle servers for an application that was only active during tax season. After this first success, Intuit subsequently moved 33 applications, 26 services and eight enabling tools to the AWS Cloud. Over the coming years, Intuit will move the rest of its applications to AWS to speed development, innovate faster, and better solve customers’ needs.