WorkflowMax Relaunches on AWS, Migrating Over 100,000 Users with Zero Disruption

WorkflowMax is a job management software platform that was owned by Xero for over a decade and widely adopted by architects, consultants, creatives, and engineering firms. Originally designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with most customers operating in teams of fewer than 30 users, the product became a dependable part of operations for many businesses—some of whom had used it for over 15 years.

In March 2023, Xero announced that it would sunset WorkflowMax by June 2024. In response, BlueRock—a multidisciplinary advisory firm that supports entrepreneurs and business owners—acquired the brand and committed to completely rebuilding it as a modern, scalable platform.

The team saw this as an opportunity not only to expand the platform’s capabilities but also to address long-standing technical limitations. The original product, built on an aging .NET framework, had become difficult to scale and modernize. It lacked many of the features customers had requested for years, and its outdated user interface no longer met the expectations of growing businesses. Rebuilding from the ground up gave WorkflowMax the flexibility to support a broader range of organizations with modern needs around scalability, user experience, and integration.

With only 12 months to design, build, and launch a new production-ready platform before the original was decommissioned, WorkflowMax had to develop a solution that could support mass data migration, near-real-time reporting, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) agility—all without disrupting customers’ day-to-day operations.

Chief Product Officer Chris Galt at WorkflowMax says, “We knew we had to move quickly and build something strong enough to carry the product's reputation and customer trust forward.”

From day one of the rebuild, WorkflowMax used AWS as its cloud foundation. The previous version of the product had been hosted on AWS, so its team was already familiar with the architecture’s reliability. AWS also offered the scalability needed to support rapid growth and fast feature iteration. The company started with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), then adopted Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and AWS Fargate for serverless container management, alongside Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to enhance performance, deployment speed, and flexibility.

To support near-real-time search across jobs, invoices, clients, and tasks, WorkflowMax selected Amazon OpenSearch Serverless. Other third-party solutions were considered, but Amazon OpenSearch Serverless stood out for its cost-effectiveness, VPC-level security, and minimal tuning requirements. Indexing and deployment took less than a month, helping the team to launch a beta version within the same timeframe. The same search experience now powers both the web and mobile applications, helping users find relevant records almost instantly—even during bulk imports. Combined with observability tools like Amazon CloudWatch, WorkflowMax can quickly troubleshoot and maintain responsive performance as its user base grows.

To ensure a seamless migration, WorkflowMax offered customers the option to test-run their data before the final cutover. In total, customers completed over 15,000 one-click migrations to preview their data, verify mappings, and ensure continuity.

In addition, WorkflowMax received guidance from AWS solution architects and specialists. AWS Partner Cloud Kinetics helped architect the solution, while AWS Partner Thoughtworks managed day-to-day infrastructure tasks—freeing the internal team to focus on product delivery.

Head of Product Macaulay Hey at WorkflowMax says, “AWS gave us the peace of mind to move fast. We could scale the architecture, handle spikes in traffic, and focus on building the product—without having to over-engineer infrastructure.”

In under five months, WorkflowMax successfully migrated over 100,000 users and completed more than 15,000 account data migrations, including documents and historical records dating back 15 years—while maintaining 99.99 percent uptime. The move to Amazon OpenSearch Serverless also delivered savings, reducing search infrastructure costs by 40 percent during testing compared to third-party alternatives. Additionally, the rebuilt platform and enhanced job profitability OS now support accounts with more than 800 users, a major leap from its original focus on SME-sized accounts.

Far exceeding the team’s expectations, a large portion of long-time customers transitioned to the new platform and embraced the refreshed experience. Several long-requested features were delivered within the first year, helping to rebuild trust. One implementation partner, Liz Tobin from Gingersnap Consulting—who has rolled out WorkflowMax across hundreds of businesses—noted that some updates were features customers had waited years for.

WorkflowMax is now expanding into new markets, including North America. The company is also working toward ISO 27001 certification—an internationally recognized standard for information security management—supported by AWS security and monitoring tools. In parallel, it’s exploring future applications of generative AI through proof-of-concepts using Amazon Bedrock.

Galt concludes, “AWS helped us replatform and build a scalable global solution from the ground up. Now we’re focused on expanding into new markets and delivering features our customers have waited years for.”