Mindtickle

Mindtickle Expands to New Regions in One Day with Platform Automation on AWS

2022

According to Gartner research, sales representatives forget 70 percent of the information they learn within a week of training, and 87 percent of those representatives forget what they learned within a month.
 
Mindtickle wants to change that. The company combines sales enablement and training, sales coaching, and analytics to create a unified approach to sales readiness. More than 250 companies around the world use Mindtickle’s Sales Readiness Platform, which offers simulated scenarios, coaching programs, quizzes, and polls. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform identifies knowledge gaps and automatically assigns training to sales representatives based on those gaps. Vivek Jain, lead CloudOps and DevOps architect for Mindtickle, says, “Our goal is to make sure sales reps are equipped with the right skills and data points before they present to prospects or customers.
 
Over the past several years, Mindtickle has grown its business by expanding its SaaS platform into new markets. As it prepared to expand to serve customers in North America, the organization knew it needed to accommodate companies from regulated industries with strict data locality requirements. “We had several scenarios where prospective customers had data that couldn’t leave the country or couldn’t leave certain locations,” Jain says.
 
Mindtickle also wanted to expand to new regions quickly to continue the company’s business growth momentum and capitalize on new opportunities. However, it needed more automation in its deployment processes to meet that goal. Jain says, “It was crucial that we address expansion in a short timeframe, and not invest the weeks or months it would usually take us to set up.”

Automating More Than 95% of Deployment

Mindtickle, which had launched its business on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2011, decided to work closely with AWS to automate its platform for rapid deployment. “Whenever we need a particular service or technology, we look to see if AWS offers that functionality, which it usually does,” says Jain.

To facilitate automation, Mindtickle adopted a microservices architecture and containers-based deployment approach using Docker and Kubernetes for its workloads hosted on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). The company then started using a serverless computing approach based on AWS Lambda and AWS Step Functions, a low-code, visual workflow service for IT automation.

Next, Mindtickle engaged the AWS account team and AWS Enterprise Support to assist in developing and optimizing the company’s AWS environment for automation. Mindtickle implemented AWS CloudFormation, an infrastructure-as-code service for modeling, provisioning, and managing AWS resources through templates. In addition, the AWS Enterprise Support Technical Account Manager and account team collaborated with Mindtickle to enhance platform security, using Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall to filter and regulate DNS traffic and Lambda@Edge, a feature of Amazon CloudFront for running code closer to application users.

By relying on AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, Mindtickle automated more than 95 percent of its core deployment pieces. Furthermore, test automation of over 1,500 cases indicated a 96 percent passing rate. “I only have to tweak certain configurations to replicate the entire Mindtickle application environment into a different region, because almost all components are already automated,” Jain says. “In the past, I’d have to work with different program managers and engineers to coordinate this, which required a lot of heavy operational work.”

Customer Marketing Sales Dashboard Graphics Concept
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We’ve reduced deployment to new regions to about a day instead of the 6–8 months it would normally take, because of the automation we have on AWS.”

Vivek Jain
Lead CloudOps and DevOps Architect, Mindtickle

Expanding to New Regions in One Day Instead of 6–8 Months

With automation in place, Mindtickle quickly expanded its Sales Readiness Platform into North American regions using a single-click deployment. “We’ve reduced deployment to new regions to about a day instead of the 6–8 months it would normally take, because of the automation we have on AWS,” says Jain. “This will help us scale our Sales Readiness Platform in the US faster and onboard new customers quickly. Eventually, using this same model, we will expand our business globally much faster than we could on our own.”
 
Mindtickle has also reduced the time required to implement disaster recovery capabilities for its platform in North America. In 2021, the business had about 40 developers working almost seven months to try and automate its stack. It has since eliminated much of that effort, saving the team approximately 10–12 weeks and ultimately reducing the cost of disaster recovery.

Ensuring Data Sovereignty and Compliance

Platform security is enhanced with AWS, which helps the company meet its customers’ strict data sovereignty requirements. “Using AWS, we can route requests to a specific region and meet our customers’ data residency needs,” Jain says. “We could not have achieved this without the help of the AWS account team, which guided us in designing the right architecture and deploying the right AWS services.”
 
Mindtickle is now evaluating additional AWS services. For example, it plans to use Amazon SageMaker to build machine learning features into its application environment, while also finding ways to optimize compute costs by taking advantage of AWS Graviton instances. Deepak Diwakar, chief technology officer and cofounder at Mindtickle, concludes, “AWS has been a reliable partner in building a multi-product platform at Mindtickle. The varied range of services offered by AWS has helped us build a resilient, highly secure, and compliant infrastructure catering to enterprise customers."

Learn More

To learn more, visit aws.amazon.com/managed-services.

About Mindtickle

Mindtickle is a sales readiness platform with services including onboarding, micro-learning, gamification, skills development, and coaching.  It is helping revenue leaders in global companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, and Wipro to define excellence, build knowledge, align content, analyze performance, and optimize behavior throughout their sales organizations.

Benefits

  • Automates more than 95% of deployment components with a 96% success rate
  • Saves 10–12 weeks of manual effort
  • Expands to new regions in 1 day instead of 6–8 months
  • Reduces disaster recovery costs
  • Ensures data sovereignty and compliance

AWS Services Used

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service

Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) is a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises.

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AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.

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AWS CloudFormation

AWS Backint Agent for SAP HANA is an SAP-certified backup and restore solution for SAP HANA workloads running on Amazon EC2 instances.

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Amazon Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall

Route 53 Resolver is a DNS server (sometimes referred to as “AmazonProvidedDNS” or the “.2 resolver”) that is available by default in all Amazon VPCs.

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