WeVets cuts tech costs by nearly 40% with managed services from Beyondsoft

THE CHALLENGE

WeVets prioritizes excellence, tradition, and innovation and expects to expand to 15 locations in the coming year. To achieve this growth, they wanted to modernize their IT environment, leveraging Microsoft solutions such as Azure and Microsoft 365.

As part of the effort, WeVets was also looking to increase management quality, optimize its infrastructure from a performance and cost perspective, improve governance and risk mitigation, and ultimately, better serve its growing customer base.

THE SOLUTION

After identifying multiple opportunities, such as increased visibility and cost predictability, Beyondsoft applied a comprehensive, three-phase approach to the project:

  1. Strategic planning: Beyondsoft experts conducted a deep assessment of the business to analyze areas such as reliability, security, operations, performance, and costs to develop an end-to-end modernization roadmap.
  2. Innovation and adoption: Beyondsoft accelerated innovation and adoption through digital and consulting services, architecture reviews, and conceptualizing new environments to address WeVets’ needs. In this phase, Beyondsoft improved governance with continuous management and optimization, with the assurance of high standards and industry-leading security and risk mitigation practices.
  3. Continuous operation and governance: In phase, the Beyondsoft Managed Services team continues to maintain the baseline established in previous phases, ensuring a high standard of governance, cost optimization, technology adoption, and security and risk mitigation. This managed services model ensures excellence while liberating WeVets to focus on delivering exemplary veterinary care to its clients and growing its business.

“With the optimization and greater efficiency in management, we can see new opportunities for investment and expansion.”

— Eduardo Ângelo, WeVets Director

THE RESULTS

Although the modernization effort is still underway, WeVets has already reaped benefits. “One of our pillars is innovation, so we constantly invest in technology,” says Eduardo Ângelo, WeVets Director. “With support from Beyondsoft, we were able to identify improvements and upgrade to a better architecture and other services that ensure new opportunities.”

 Additional benefits include:

  • 30-40% reduction in technology costs
  • Adoption of financial control and governance practices
  • Increased security and risk mitigation across their systems and applications

To learn more about how Beyondsoft can help your business, contact us today. To learn more about how Beyondsoft is empowering modernization and growth for WeVets, watch this short video.

Managed service desk solution positions biotech company for rapid growth

THE CHALLENGE

To prepare for twofold growth across its workforce in the coming years, our client wanted to improve and scale their employee and contractor support experience. They wanted a knowledgeable partner to manage their new Enterprise Service Desk and provide a scalable and flexible solution for managing their rapidly growing IT footprint.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft ramped up quickly, deploying trained service desk teams, implementing intelligent automation, and operationalizing a cost-effective 24×7 global delivery model. The managed service desk solution included:

  • Omnichannel L0 support through a self-help portal and a walk-up desk.
  • 24×7 L1 and L2 support delivered by synchronized onsite and offshore teams.
  • Sub-15-minute response time for P1 tickets and 1-hour response time for all incidents.
  • Adoption of KPIs like MTTR, FCR, CSAT, and Hold Time in the roadmap.
  • Intelligent automation of service desk workflows leveraging Beyondsoft’s BIOPs-AI/ML platform post-steady state.

THE RESULTS
  • Rapid three-week transition to primary ownership of all service desk processes.
  • Achievement of steady state within four weeks of contract finalization.
  • Suppression of ticket volume and elimination of trouble tickets.
  • Significant improvements across MTTR and the user experience.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Intelligent automation of service desk workflows leveraging Beyondsoft’s BIOPs-AI/ML platform post steady state.

ETL monitoring and management solution increases visibility by 87% and productivity by 43%

THE CHALLENGE

At the time, our banking customer had no central ETL monitoring and management solution for their data warehouse. They did not have visibility into the jobs that were scheduled or underway or which jobs had failed. They had no method for automatically reinitiating jobs that had failed. They were also unable to pinpoint the reason a job failed.

 They needed a centralized dashboard to handle their business side as well as the ability to monitor and manage hundreds of attributes around the various jobs, including job status, job flows, errors and failures, successful completions, failure reports, ticket handling, and more. Our customer also needed the ability to retrigger failed jobs on an ad-hoc basis along with process lineage visibility.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft created a centralized ETL monitoring and management solution, including multiple MVPs within just seven months. The solution enables our customer to monitor incoming jobs from several data pipelines from multiple source systems in different formats. The solution delivers insights on job status including run time, success or failure status, reason of failure, and other key measures.

Beyondsoft also created a tool to automatically handle job failures. When a job fails, the tool creates a failure report with in-depth details including who initiated the job, how long the job had been running, the reason for failure, and other details. The solution then automatically generates a ticket that is escalated to the appropriate party.

ETL monitoring and management solution architecture overview
ETL monitoring and management solution architecture
THE RESULTS

The ETL monitoring and management solution provides our customer with a central dashboard for monitoring as well as in-depth visibility and control through error detection, error enrichment, event triggering services, unified monitoring service, unified metadata, SLA impact, and recovery. Our customer also benefits from enhancements in their existing components like Airflow, Job Server, Ingestion, Computes, and DaaS. The solution from Beyondsoft delivered the following benefits:

  • Increased productivity by 43%.
  • Reduced losses from job failures by 76%.
  • Cut required headcount in half, from 16 to 8.
  • Increased observability of the entire process by 87%.
TECHNOLOGIES USED

Java 1.8, Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Spring MVP, Spring Data, Spring Security, Kafka, ELK, Filebeat, Healthbeat, Kubernetes, Docker, Jenkins, React js, and Kibana.

Cloud for Startups taps Beyondsoft to operationalize service desk

THE CHALLENGE

The customer needed a knowledgeable service desk vendor to quickly operationalize their Cloud for Startups program and onboard venture capital partner startups. The vendor also needed to offer a premium white-glove experience for the program’s members. 

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft quickly ramped up an experienced team that had delivered outstanding results in a similar program. As the program rolled out, the Beyondsoft concierge support team began to fully manage the program’s application and onboarding processes, as well as the program’s inboxes to respond to all program, product, and service inquiries and resolve all partnership, eligibility, and billing issues. 

The Beyondsoft concierge support team also provided a frictionless, white-glove experience for the members to help them navigate the program with ease and efficiency and accelerate their progress toward joint-sell ready status. Recently, Beyondsoft completed the automation of most the application and onboarding processes, allowing resources to be redirected to Tier 3 and Tier 4 escalation support, which adds greater value to the customer’s success and required more expert program knowledge. 

THE RESULTS

Since the cloud program’s inception three years ago, Beyondsoft has successfully supported the program’s day-to-day operations, which has seen exponential growth. In 2020 alone, the customer reported the program had enabled B2B startups to close $1 billion in revenue through deployment of cloud solutions and new business opportunities. 

The customer sees Beyondsoft as a partner in the continued improvement of the Cloud for Startups program. Progress is underway to engage Beyondsoft’s in-house artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) team to introduce ML and predictive analytics solutions to help the customer conduct business with proactive decisions, intelligent KPI monitoring, and complex workflow automation.

Contact us to learn more about Beyondsoft’s BPO and service desk offerings.

Automotive manufacturer accelerates CI/CD, expands automation, and boosts quality with scalable DevOps

THE CHALLENGE

To drive business growth and meet rising customer demands, a leading automotive manufacturer needed to accelerate application release cycles and boost the quality and reliability of their systems in North America. But their lack of an enterprise-ready, scalable DevOps platform had produced siloed teams, long development cycles, and increasing amounts of technical debt. Meanwhile, encumbered by inefficient, manual processes and inconsistent development environments, their applications and systems teams struggled to meet the needs of the business.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft worked with the automotive manufacturer to create a standardized set of automation tools by provisioning an enterprise-scalable, hybrid-cloud DevOps platform that integrates with their existing cloud and on-premise systems. Beyondsoft onboarded more than 120 different applications.

The solution features:

  • Enterprise-ready, highly available DevOps platform
  • Scalable automation in the cloud
  • Highly resilient, container-first strategy
  • Seamless integration with their existing hybrid-cloud ecosystem
  • Ability to handle any application language
  • Streamlined processes and automation
  • Visibility into technical debt

Notable AWS services used to complete this project include:

Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS): Each of the DevOps tools (except Xray) run as an ECS task. ECS is used to manage task distribution among ECS cluster instances. It restarts any task that becomes unavailable. Tasks include: Jenkins, XL Release, SonarQube, and Artifactory.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3): Several buckets are provisioned for Terraform state retention, software storage, backups, logs, and Artifactory binary storage.

Amazon DynamoDB Table: A table is created specifically for locking the Terraform state file in S3. This avoids any corruption of state during parallel Terraform execution.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) SSM Parameter Store: All secrets and necessary resource endpoints/confirmation are stored in the SSM Parameter Store. Secrets are encrypted.

Application Load Balancer: All traffic is routed through the Application Load Balancer. The listener is configured to route traffic based on if/then rules (e.g., if host is Artifactory.*, then forward to artifactory-target-group). Each target group is defined for a particular port specific to the DevOps tool, and when each ECS service is created, it is mapped to its target group for load balancing.

Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for Aurora PostgreSQL: An Aurora PostgreSQL cluster is provisioned for storing application state. Each tool creates its own databases within the RDS instance. A snapshot of the RDS instance is taken regularly for recovery purposes.

Amazon Elastic Filesystem (EFS): EFS is used to persist DevOps tool configuration data that is not stored in the database. This allows us to spin up new ECS services and tasks without loss of configuration, plugins, etc.

RESULTS AND BENEFITS

Today, the automotive manufacturer is enjoying all the benefits scalable enterprise DevOps has to offer. Their teams have been unified onto one consistent DevOps platform. Automation has replaced cumbersome, manual processes, boosting the speed and reliability of innovation–and paving the way for seamless collaboration between their applications and systems teams. Most importantly, DevOps has laid the foundation for continued business growth to meet the demands of its expanding customer base.

Benefits include:

  • Enterprise scalability for business growth
  • Highly available, self-healing systems
  • Faster, more efficient release cycles
  • Increased code quality and reliability
  • Task automation
  • Greater efficiency and productivity
  • Frictionless collaboration between teams
  • Fail-fast environment
  • Amplified feedback loops via CI/CD pipelines

TECHNOLOGIES USED

Amazon ECS, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB Table, EC2 SSM Parameter Store, Application Load Balancer, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ for Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon EFS

OUR EXPERTISE

As an AWS DevOps Competency Partner, Beyondsoft has invested in building deep DevOps proficiency on the AWS platform. Our certified practitioners combine agile AWS tools, best practices, and methodologies along with our BCI DevOps enablement framework to establish an enterprise-scalable CI/CD platform with automated practices to expedite innovation and meet your business objectives.

To learn more, contact us today.


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Automotive manufacturer leverages flexibility & scalability of AWS cloud-native infrastructure

THE CHALLENGE

Our customer had recently decommissioned one of their U.S. data centers. To expedite their transition to the cloud, they had shifted their on-premise infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS), saving substantial money and delivering increased uptime, among other benefits. The move also positioned them to take a phased approach toward optimizing their infrastructure for the cloud.

Developed on the Jboss platform, many of their applications were tied together, so issues impacting one service often impacted the other. As the final step in their journey to the AWS cloud, our customer needed to re-architect and decouple priority applications to improve stability, flexibility, and scalability.

THE SOLUTION

Our customer asked us to refactor and migrate two high priority applications to a cloud-native architecture. Their internal Karma application enables administrators to manage internal permissions at a granular level. Their Distributor Information Service (DIS) application provides automobile dealership search functionality for their external-facing website. As part of the migration, we also moved our customer to a fully automated pipeline, using Infrastructure as Code (IAC) and Terraform to build the infrastructure.

We chose two main platforms for the applications: AWS Elastic Beanstalk for the Karma Admin component and AWS Lambda serverless compute service for the web server components of both Karma and DIS. We decoupled and re-architected the serverless portions of the applications into Node.JS while keeping the admin portions in Java. By decoupling the applications and eliminating resource sharing, we removed potential risk.

For the Karma Admin, we integrated Azure directory for authentication using AWS Application Load Balancing integration with OpenID Connect (OIDC). The serverless portions of the applications leverage AWS Lambda functions, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS WAF. Amazon RDS for MySQL is used for one of the apps in the portfolio as well as AWS DynamoDB Global tables. For the DIS application we used Amazon Aurora Global RDS.

For the DevOps pipeline, we used Amazon EKS for Jenkins slave nodes to do deployment. We also developed pipelines to deploy the Beanstalks and serverless through the pipeline. We used Excel Release and Artifactory as a part of that pipeline and BitBucket for the repository. For application logging, we used ElasticSearch with Kibana. We leveraged AWS Direct Connect for network connectivity and AWS Transit Hub for VPN connectivity and used tunnels between VPC and the hub.

RESULTS

  • Easier to support: Decoupling and refactoring the applications has streamlined support efforts and ensures that any issues that arise are isolated to only one application.
  • Increased scalability: The decoupled, cloud-native applications are far more scalable and flexible.
  • Continuous release cycle: The DevOps pipeline has enabled CI/CD for faster, higher quality releases.
  • High availability architecture: The use of multiple availability zones, active-active mode, and automated failover between regions minimizes downtime.
  • Self-healing: These applications were set up for high resiliency, with automated failover between the regions.

TECHNOLOGIES USED

AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, AWS Application Load Balancing, AWS Lambda, Amazon CloudFront, AWS WAF, Amazon RDS for MySQL, AWS DynamoDB Global, Amazon Aurora Global RDS, AWS Direct Connect, AWS Transit Hub, Amazon EKS

OUR EXPERTISE

Beyondsoft has performed hundreds of data and application migrations for large enterprise customers. Our certified practitioners have hands-on, best-practice knowledge of all the major platforms. As an AWS Data Migration Competency Partner, Beyondsoft has invested in building deep proficiency on the AWS platform.

To learn more about how we can help you, explore our Cloud Services and contact us today.


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Imagine Communications boosts performance and scalability with AWS cloud migration

THE CHALLENGE

The Imagine Communications Research and Development data team challenge was twofold. First, they had to reduce prohibitive overhead and operational costs associated with developing a new product on Azure using Microsoft SQL Server. Second, they needed to deliver a new analytics platform built to leverage their existing analytic tools, provide instant elasticity, integrate multiple data sources, and reduce time to deliver new products and services.

This analytics system transforms TV ratings data provided by Nielsen and ComScore spanning more than 200 geographic markets in a single serverless Data Lake.

THE SOLUTION

After a thorough consultation and evaluation, the Beyondsoft Big Data team proposed a solution built on AWS cloud-native services, comprised of Athena, Glue, Redshift, and Redshift Spectrum. The project also included the easy deployment of Redshift clusters and event-driven pipelines to allow Imagine Communications to move large amounts of daily generated data to a Redshift cluster.

Beyondsoft also implemented tuning and revision of the former workflow. Changes included:

  • Historical data and real-time data provided by Nielsen and ComScore, the rating agencies, is now stored in S3, consisting of more than 1 million files and more than 50 TB of uncompressed data.
  • The input data comes in a mainframe-like format, so a Lambda/Python function was used to convert to S3 in JSON format. Lambda functions were used for high concurrency data processing for S3 files and were invoked more than 1 million times to process more than 800,000 files in one hour.
  • To save money, the S3/JSON data was converted to Parquet format using Spark which runs in Fargate containers.
  • The Glue Catalog has more than 2,000 tables that is queried by Athena.
  • The Parquet-formatted data stored in S3 was moved to Redshift Spectrum and Redshift Clusters via staging tables.
  • The Redshift cluster, which is a 2-node RA3 configuration, houses more than 20TB of raw data for 4 years.
  • The ETL into the Redshift cluster is done by Python/SQL using Fargate containers.
  • The Reporting UI now communicates to the Redshift spectrum and Redshift cluster through C# API.

By implementing the AWS managed services stack and architectural advancements, the Beyondsoft Big Data team successfully delivered a scalable, truly elastic, and highly performant data solution that also met Imagine Communications’ stringent success criteria. By moving to the AWS cloud platform, the overall cost to operate the new solution dropped from an average of $200,000 per month to an average of $5,000 per month.

KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

During the engagement with Imagine Communications, the Beyondsoft team also provided education and training, so that the Imagine Communications Data Analytics Team could take ownership of the newly developed environment. As a practice, the Beyondsoft Big Data Team developed and delivered a runbook, so that Imagine Communications could not only manage the newly provided data platform, but also add to the solution in the future.

BENEFITS

Migrating from Microsoft SQL Server on Azure to Redshift on Amazon Web Services provided Imagine Communications with increased performance, high scalability, and faster data processing by leveraging a sophisticated data lake solution.


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Beyondsoft Service Desk team increases call center monitoring coverage by 100% without adding headcount

THE CHALLENGE

The client needed a full command over its call center monitoring ecosystem. It was monitoring 50% of the calls, with mostly repetitive and manual processes. The client sought to implement intelligent service desk operations through automated solutions.

THE SOLUTION

Beyondsoft quickly scaled the client’s operation by customizing and deploying the Beyondsoft Intelligent Operations Platform (BIOPS). Within months, the global coverage map saw a significant growth. The client more than doubled its monitoring capacity to include all 350 queues of consumer calls, representing a 100% coverage, and reduced the incident response time, all without adding headcount.

As an artificial intelligence/machine learning solution, BIOPS fulfilled the client’s need to eliminate manual processes and embrace automated monitoring, issue detection, and alerts. In addition, the client also automated ticket escalation, call-to-action, and root cause analysis.

Beyondsoft’s managed service also provided the client additional business resiliency through geographic diversification by operating in China, India, and Costa Rica. The offshore teams monitored the support calls around the clock and across all geographies The client gained total visibility of the entire operations, which was critical to the ever-increasing demand for omni-channel support. 

Ultimately, the call center operations became more efficient and intelligent, able to identify issues early to reduce call volume and accelerate issue resolution, potentially even fixing issues before consumers notice them.


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Beyondsoft Service Desk increases operational efficiency and scalability

THE CHALLENGE

The client needed a new content delivery platform to support a global base of OEM partners. The client was looking for deep CMS expertise and successful experience in running efficient service desks to manage content creation and change requests.

THE SOLUTION

The client leveraged Beyondsoft’s SiteCore expertise to establish a new content delivery platform. In addition to implementing the new CMS, the Beyondsoft service desk implemented a new publishing model to improve the efficiency of the content creation, modification, and audit processes.

The client gained the experience and ability to scale quickly; recruiting, training, and transitioning work from
the incumbent supplier in less than 30 days. When the transition was complete, the editorial and publishing team was already standing by to create content to support the 80+ stakeholders. In FY17, the new team created and wrote for 900 assets and edited and published 1900 assets.

The CMS expertise also helped the client to reliably migrate 2115 existing site assets. All content was checked for tone consistency and adherence to the Microsoft style guide. Collectively, the service desk resolved/published over 3900 tickets and publishing requests in FY17. Throughout the normal run workload, the client never saw a service interruption or missed SLA.

Other improvements included enhanced program governance that included a rhythm of business engagement for the MBR/QBR reports. The client also leveraged Beyondsoft’s BI/analytics experience to continually improve its KPI/site performance. Most impressively, tickets were automatically resolved with greater accuracy, which increased the overall service desk efficiency by 6%.


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Telecom operator increases efficiency with predictive analytics

THE CHALLENGE

The client’s environment was comprised of 100+ subsystems that had over 10,000 components. The systems averaged one to four million alerts a day with an accuracy of 45%. The client wanted to reach an accuracy rating of 75% through the use of predictive analytics.

THE SOLUTION

The solution included organizing existing workflows and knowledge base, labeling data for common issues and resolutions, then building machine learning (ML) model-based data to identify anomalies and find associations.

By combining repeating alerts and categorizing similar ones, the volume of alerts was reduced 95.2%. Efficiency was further improved by automating the alert-handling process where automated detection and diagnosis were implemented to minimize human engagement. Alerts were also batch-processed to increase the throughput.

At the system and data level, Beyondsoft performed the association analysis to identify 40 hidden relationships amongst alerts. With the help of the expert system, this effort allowed a comprehensive data collection and integration that successfully facilitated root cause analysis.

With the benefits generated by accurate prediction, anomaly detection, association analysis, and resolution recommendation, the client achieved several important efficiency improvements:

  • 30% reduction in labor cost
  • 50% reduction in false alerts
  • 80% reduction in time to mitigate
  • Reduced mishandled incidents from 2% to 0.5%


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