Improvement-IT Uses TechNative to Migrate to AWS, Speeds Customer Onboarding, and Reduces Support Calls by 15%

As a provider of IoT solutions to companies across many industries, Improvement-IT knew that responsiveness and reliability were key to a good customer experience. But as a customer of a managed services provider that was supporting its IT infrastructure, it was dissatisfied with the support it was receiving. Some of its systems were running on AWS and others were using on-premises technology. The company depended on these systems to provide its customers with accurate and current data about their operational processes, especially for managing and tracking assets. Whether those assets were display racks for a greeting card company or supply containers for an oil drilling platform or assets for showing status and location in healthcare, its clients depended on Improvement-IT so they could track and manage how assets were distributed.

Improvement-IT wanted to better serve its existing customers and continue to grow the business. To achieve that, it was looking for a new company to support it. “Our customers range from healthcare providers tracking wheelchairs and the location of available hospital assets, to oil companies managing supply containers going to oil drilling platforms, to greeting card companies keeping track of retail display racks, to application and enforcement of vignettes for transit and mooring, to field service apps for sewer maintenance,” says Rick Zwart, chief technology officer (CTO) of Improvement-IT. “Regardless of their business, responsiveness and accuracy are important to our customers. Our previous hosting provider couldn’t support us as we tried to improve and grow our services.”

There were no dramatic incidents that motivated Improvement-IT to look for another partner. It was more that it had outgrown its provider’s capabilities. The company wanted deeper knowledge of AWS and a more proactive approach to managing its services. Instead of spending time managing the relationship with its service provider, it wanted to focus on developing and rolling out improvements to its customers. It asked AWS to introduce it to potential partners and found what it was looking for in AWS Partner TechNative, a Netherlands-based cloud consultancy.

TechNative began its relationship with Improvement-IT by conducting an AWS Well-Architected review. AWS Well-Architected helps cloud architects build secure, high-performing, resilient, and efficient infrastructure for a variety of applications and workloads. Built around six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability—AWS Well-Architected provides a consistent approach for customers and partners to evaluate architectures and implement scalable designs. “We see a Well-Architected review as the first step when working with a new client,” says Bas Anneveld, founder of TechNative. “It helped us and Improvement-IT to understand how to best commit resources for the greatest outcome.”

The revamp started with TechNative rebuilding Improvement-IT’s AWS presence and migrating it to a more efficient architecture. This was followed by migrating its on-premises workloads to AWS, creating a cloud-native solution for the company. The solution uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to provide flexible compute power as needed. Improvement-IT is also developing its understanding of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—which can remove inefficient and time-consuming database administrative tasks without needing to provision infrastructure or maintain software—to optimize development and deployment of innovations in its service. AWS Control Tower enables users to automate the creation of AWS accounts with built-in governance and to enforce best practices, standards, and regulatory requirements with preconfigured controls. And by rebuilding the platform to use infrastructure as code (IaC), response times for many operations have been reduced. By being built for the cloud, Improvement-IT has eliminated hardware acquisition costs.

It was important to Improvement-IT that TechNative would run and maintain the company’s AWS environment so that Improvement-IT could focus on its services to customers. “TechNative had the AWS expertise to get our systems fully migrated and took the time to learn our business,” says Zwart. “This meant they could make suggestions about how to use AWS services to improve our business. We were working with advisors, not simply technicians.”