We were looking for a five-part solution that scales well, is fast, and has the ability to be quickly provisioned in the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) environment. Our product requires it to be quick because It is a memory database that also has persistence, which has to be real-time.
We are an enterprise performance management (EPM) company. As an 18-year-old company, we have a lot of legacy systems. Around 2011 to 2012, we decided to move to the cloud. We have pretty ambitious plans to lift and shift all of our customers to the cloud. For the past three years, we've been aggressively pushing our cloud offering. It is a fully managed cloud EPM solution that we are providing to our customers. The whole infrastructure, platform, and product are totally managed by us. We are partnering with Microsoft and running it on Microsoft Azure.
We are in the process of modernizing the whole offering and making it cloud native. We've been modernizing for the past year and a half. One of the problems that you need to solve is also storage. This is where we bumped into NetApp. It's not only about compute. It's also about storage and networking. The storage becomes quite an important role.
We have seen solutions where you need to provision totally new storage, e.g., two terabytes, then reconfigure, shut down everything, reconfigure, and copy data to bigger storage and restart. This requires a lot of manual work, etc. With NetApp, you don't need that. You just do it via the API, and say, "I require an increase." Four terabytes is the smallest pool size, and I can say, "Give me additional terabytes," and it happens immediately.
If you go to our website, you can trial our products by clicking a button. In the past, you would go to the website, click on that button, and fill in a form, then you would get some notification saying, "Thank you for registering. We will let you know as soon as this is over," or something like that. 20 minutes later you get an email saying, "Your environment is ready. Go ahead and try it out." What we managed to get with AKS, and especially with NetApp, is that this is almost a real-time experience. You fill in the form, click on the button, create, and the process takes around 20 seconds. You still get email in the back, but you end up with the trial environment provisioned on-the-fly in real-time. For this use case, this increases the marketing funnel. We get more inquiries and leads through it as the people trying it out are more engaged and do not get bored by waiting.
For example, if you go to Google and search for a product/offering, you find it. You don't want go to their site only to get the message, "I'll let you know when it's done." You want to try it immediately, as you're hooked on it. If you're already in the product, you want try it as a potential customer. You already know with a high probability that, "Yeah, this is the right product for me," or it's not. But, this saves the customer time.
In the past, we would provision for as much as we need or guarantee to a customer. E.g., if a customer said, "Look, I need two terabytes," or he pays for two terabyte of storage, we provisioned two terabyte of storage. Although, he's consuming only fraction of it, we still provisioned and kept that in use. With NetApp, you can do this on-the-fly.
