Warehouse Management Software Company

About the Business

This Warehouse Management Software company is a leader in WMS solutions. They partner with customers to quickly transform paper-based, error-prone businesses into service leaders who can focus on customer satisfaction, operate more efficiently, and grow faster. Founded over 15 years ago, they now serve more almost 1000 customers around the world, and are used by over 10,000 logistics professionals..

Business Objective

This Warehouse Management Software company supports third-party logistics companies with their complete warehouse management system (WMS) and logisticsplatform. To meet customer expectations around order fulfilment, warehouse operations require real-time data and uninterrupted business continuity. To achieve this, they embarked on migrating to AWS for reliability and scalability – two things their old vendor was unable to provide.

Their overall objective was to reduce the probability, impact, and exposure of critical events, such as outages and failures. The warehouse management software company and their customers require an environment that can keep up with seasonal peaks, and off-season lulls. On the cusp of becoming profitable, Board members wanted to be involved in choosing the right partner for migration to ensure affordability, expertise, and speed. As an added element, they needed the migration completed within 90 days, so they could operate for 30 days prior to the shopping holidays, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The Business Challenge

With their previous provider, they had to over provision, buying more hardware and renting more space to prepare for seasonal demand. Outages caused by internal problems with the provider, made it impossible for them to scale up and down as needed. They had a high cost-to-failure rate, customer satisfaction was declining due to frequent outages, and they couldn’t rely on their vendor. For two years they were stuck in TCO evaluation, struggling to make the migration costs work. On the verge of profitability and only a couple months out from some of the busiest shopping days of the year, it was a critical time for the business and they needed top-level buy-in to move forward.

Migration was further complicated by the database architecture. Each one of their thousands and thousands of customers had their own separate database. A complex database like this requires extensive effort and coordination to both migrate and connect all the servers and applications for communication. While the model is good for security, and sometimes parsing, it’s not efficient, effective, or optimized in the cloud.

The 2nd Watch Solution

Gaining Board and Business Leader Buy-in

The first thing 2nd Watch and the warehouse management software company had to do was convince the C-suite of the cost of doing nothing, and value of migrating to AWS. 2nd Watch mapped a TCO-friendly migration plan and gained buy-in from the C-suite based on productivity growth. After evaluating 2nd Watch and another Premier AWS Partner, the board and business leaders chose to partner with 2nd Watch.

We met their need for an agile partner that provides architectural and planning design, refactoring support, and ongoing run support. They wanted a trusted partner with proven capabilities in the cloud with automation, stability, risk mitigation, and tools to improve performance. Based on referrals from Amazon and their partner, they wanted the value of partnering with a provider that works closelywith clients, rather than just ‘templating’ clients.

 Successfully migrating thousands of complex databases

2nd Watch used workload rationalization for the migration and helped secure their landing zone. After consulting with the architecture company, Amazon, and among 2nd Watch Cloud Advisors, we planned on moving them into Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).

Unfortunately, despite all the research and stakeholder agreement, RDS was unableto handle all of their databases. In the middle of the migration, 2nd Watch had to modify the original plan and put the databases on SQL in EC2. In spite of the hiccup,which required additional scope, resources, and hours, 2nd Watch completed the migration more than a month ahead of the 90-day timeline.

Continuing the partnership toward full native modernization

Following the successful migration to AWS, they extended the partnership to become more cloud native and modernize from both a database and application perspective. Because the database layer is such a huge part of their business, and contains so much of their business logic, 2nd Watch is moving it to Amazon Aurora, a cloud native architecture. Additionally, the application side is going to be modernized with more of a microservices style approach so they can get off direct Amazon EC2 for full modernization.

Based on the success of the initial migration project, the Warehouse Management Software company has partnered with 2nd Watch for nearly all of their cloud services, including:

 

• Data assessment to support data monetization
• Application modernization
• Database modernization
• Security
• Managed services (foundational, DBA, and optimization)
• DataOps

The Business Benefits

With 2nd Watch by their side, the company finally convinced their C-suite to move forward with the business-changing migration, the project was completed ahead of schedule, and now they have a trusted partner for continued optimization. Migratingto AWS solved the scalability and business continuity issues they had with their previous provider. Since the migration, they have had no outages. The company increased their time-to-market and productivity, accelerated the path to profitability, decreased their risk profile, and improved customer satisfaction. They are now able to fail fast and utilize their data and analytics to monetize customer reporting, and complete POCs. Overall, the value of the company has grown exponentially.

In less than a year with 2nd Watch, the company has gone from having absolutely no presence on Amazon, to becoming fully mature within the Amazon stack. They’regetting signed up for an enterprise discount program (EDP), learning how to monitorand manage the environment, and with Amazon security, they feel comfortable building their presence without risk. 2nd Watch is monitoring their environment so they can mature at a much faster rate without the responsibility of operations employees. While larger corporations might charge $10 million and take three yearsto complete a similar project, 2nd Watch has the experience and expertise of a tenure team that delivers results quickly.

What started as a simple lift and shift has quickly grown into a trusted partnership with a bright future. 2nd Watch will continue to work with different teams to modernize applications and become cloud native for reduced cost and complexity, while enhancing scalability.