Spireon Streamlines Infrastructure with AWS Marketplace Solutions

Spireon, Inc. is a North American connected-vehicle intelligence company, providing businesses and consumers with insights to track, manage, and protect automobile assets. The company supports nearly four million subscribers across its suite of products for car dealers, financial institutions, rental car agencies, fleet operators, and consumers. Spireon wanted to ensure that it could efficiently evaluate, procure, and deploy Amazon Web Services (AWS) services to standardize its development practices and improve business outcomes. AWS Marketplace has enabled Spireon to manage a portfolio of vendors in one place while solving multiple business problems. With solutions from Snowflake, MongoDB, and Harness, Spireon is able to optimize its AWS commitment and stay on the cutting edge.

Over nearly three years, Spireon has used AWS services for speed and flexibility when deploying new workloads across its multiple business units. Because all the services rely on a single platform, the company has been able to centralize its infrastructure and DevOps teams, allowing for seamless collaboration. AWS Marketplace provided the company the opportunity to capitalize on this continuity by swiftly procuring software products preconfigured to integrate with its existing architecture.

AWS Marketplace private offers also provided an accelerated and simplified procurement process for Spireon. Vice president of IT and operations, Gary Rizo says, “We ask our vendors to provide us a private offer through AWS Marketplace because of the simplified deal execution. A link is sent, and within minutes, we're able to procure an agreement as opposed to going through the multiple iterations of paperwork with standard procurement processes. The main driver is the lack of friction, but the private offers also contribute to the spending commitment of our enterprise discount program (EDP) agreement." 

When Spireon needed a data warehouse solution better aligned with its usage and cost requirements, the company turned to AWS Marketplace and its variety of third-party vendors. Ultimately, the company chose Snowflake for its scalability, advanced reporting, and flexible payment options. Snowflake’s on-demand data warehouse provides real-time reporting and embedded dashboards across the company’s four different business units. Snowflake enables data-driven enterprises with instant elasticity, secure data sharing, and per-second pricing. “In the last three years, I don't recall that we've had a single infrastructure incident with Snowflake. That is a tremendous value for us because we run pretty lean when it comes to infrastructure support. They provide in-house data protection against corruption and user errors, through the time travel feature which has an instant rollback capability. Also, the ability to pay for usage as we go and roll over unused credit to the following year has helped us be more financially conscious,” Rizo says of the product’s impact.

Spireon currently has over 130 terabytes of active storage in Snowflake. In just over three years of use, reporting times have decreased from 48 hours to about two minutes.

With the data warehousing handled, Spireon set its sights on standardizing its application release process with Harness Continuous Delivery from Harness, Inc., procured from AWS Marketplace. The main issue with releases was that each product engineering group had its own release method, which made alignment and collaboration nearly impossible. The lack of uniformity also made the release process difficult to review and improve because each team would have unique problems that required painstaking, individualized solutions.

Harness provided continuity for engineers across the organization for release support. Rizo says of Harness, “It’s really the glue behind our deployment model, and that’s what was missing. We needed a uniform structure, and the service has provided a model that all our engineers have adapted to. With this alignment, we have reduced the average release time of 45 minutes down to sub-five minutes.”

Harness has also allowed Spireon to reduce the number of staff involved in the release process as well. What once required multiple engineers, developers, DevOps, and quality assurance teams is now handled by a single person. Because of the integrations and checkpoints that Harness allows for, such as anomaly detection using artificial intelligence (AI), fewer people need to be involved during releases.

With engineers aligned and following a structured deployment plan, the company wanted to better manage its data intake and offer customers instant insights. Using MongoDB for AWS, Spireon built two data stores that securely and automatically process millions of tracking device messages per day. The company built its primary operational data store on-premises to handle 102 terabytes of low-frequency device data. To track its high-frequency devices, Spireon built out its telemetry platform using MongoDB Atlas, a managed version of the solution, in the cloud. The cloud solution allows customers access to vehicle tracking data in real time, as often as needed, and gives Spireon complete control of what gets shared. Combined, these databases process about 2,300 device messages per second and well over 100 million messages per day.

Another major benefit of using MongoDB is the company’s dedication to its clients. “They've been supporting our business more than any other partner. Their customer success managers, project managers, and consultants have been embedded within Spireon over the last three years, providing an incredibly unique experience. We look at them as an extension of our core engineers helping to support us and provide continuous innovation within our organization,” touted Rizo.

Spireon has taken a unique approach to managing vendor relationships and simplifying its infrastructure needs with AWS Marketplace. This operational mentality has helped to streamline relationship building and contract management, keeping the company agile and informed when examining its ecosystem. Rizo believes that this will help the company better manage its time, resources, and relationships with tedious manual revisions. “Contract management is a key focus area for us. Recently, we’ve been trying to consolidate all contracts into a single platform and searching for a solution that can provide that. Of course, there are lots of different contract management solutions out there, and we even explored building our own. It was AWS Marketplace that really made it convenient to see solutions like MongoDB, Snowflake, Harness, and others from a single pane of glass. In the future, we won’t need to go search through emails or folders, comparing last year's contract versus the current agreement. I believe the benefit of consolidating these contracts into a single place will only prove more valuable over time.”