WebiPlex

Case Study: SaaS Document and Process Management Provider Grows with Cloud Enterprise

Cloud computing has quickly gained an audience with large Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) organizations like Saleforce.com, Google Apps and SAP, but what about small and medium businesses (SMBs)?

Cloud computing has quickly gained an audience with large Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) organizations like Saleforce.com, Google Apps and SAP, but what about small and medium businesses (SMBs)?

Webiplex, a fast-growth SaaS provider based in Newport Beach, California, illustrates how the experiences of a SMB SaaS provider uses cloud hosting to eliminate a single point of failure, increase security within their environment, provide scalability for forecasted growth, and have more visibility into the management and usage of their hosted solution than ever before - which in turn allows them to deliver their infrastructure-dependent product more effectively to clients.

Webiplex's flagship product, DocuPeak, provides a business process management product to Data, Process and IT Analysts through a SaaS model. DocuPeak offers clients unprecedented document control, compliance and management. DocuPeak applications can be customized based on the needs of each individual business and are easy to assemble and modify.

Webiplex's continued growth has been highlighted by its work with numerous local governments. In addition to the public sector, Webiplex has had tremendous growth in the manufacturing supply-chain processes and accounting industries. Due to their growth, Webiplex has readjusted the size of their hosted infrastructure with Hosting.com three times since 2005 - starting with a Virtual Private Server (VPS), then upgrading to a Dedicated Server Solution, before ultimately migrating to Cloud Enterprise - Hosting.com's cloud hosting solution.

"We've effectively implemented a long term growth strategy with Cloud Enterprise," stated Rob Rennie, Webiplex Founder and CTO. He continued, "Our relationship with Hosting.com allows us outsource our IT to accommodate our expansion. Our most recent move to Cloud Enterprise was our easiest transition yet - we planned for two months and completed the migration in two weeks!"

Cloud of Mystery

For many companies, the term cloud computing is so loosely defined and strongly focused on the Enterprise marketplace that it is hard for SMBs to fully grasp the potential value and benefits cloud services can provide to their business. The way in which many providers price their solutions is a perfect example of this and was also evident in the results of Hosting.com's Cloud Computing Trends Report.

"I could only find esoteric cloud pricing models from other providers - bandwidth in, bandwidth out, compute cycles, add-ons for storage, CPUs, etc. I'm a CTO, part of my job is to understand computing resources and needs; quite frankly, I couldn't begin to calculate my monthly spend on most cloud hosting platforms," noted Rennie.

Webiplex's experiences with understanding cloud computing are not unique. Many cloud providers are not forthright with details on their cloud infrastructure and services. Often, providers lead consumers to believe the cloud hosting infrastructure is beyond their comprehension. Not with Cloud Enterprise, which was created on a standards-based platform across geographically dispersed data centers utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. Hosting.com purposefully provides clients a high level of transparency and understanding on how the solution is provided.

"Cloud Enterprise is not a programmer-based solution, and the pricing model provides a hybrid solution of metered and traditional expenses. Once the benefits of cloud hosting [high availability, scalability, fault tolerance, etc] were explained to me by Hosting.com, I knew that I wanted to implement it. With Cloud Enterprise, I didn't have to learn a new language and I didn't have to call our CPA to determine how much it would cost each month, it was an easy decision," added Rennie.

Visibility in Virtual Manager

The administration and support of cloud hosting solutions continues to be a major barrier for companies evaluating cloud hosting offerings. Due to this client concern, Hosting.com provides all clients root access to the server on Cloud Enterprise and invests heavily in its Cloud Enterprise portal - Virtual Manager.

Virtual Manager currently allows clients to power servers on and off; suspend and reset; view and save snapshots; set alerts for resource utilization; add resources such as memory, RAM, CPU and storage; and monitor performance statistics.

"We use it almost every day. The snapshot functionality is a great disaster recovery feature. For Webiplex, the best feature is the performance reporting," said Rennie. "It gives us a competitive edge in determining when and how we will need to scale our solution. It's no longer, ëlet's call Hosting.com' - we can now tell you how much CPU we need for each client - and price our services accordingly!"

Additional enhancements to Virtual Manager will allow clients to: self-service provision, add and clone virtual machines, and start global load balancing online through the distributed cloud. Virtual Manager will completely integrate with the vCloud API from VMware.

Security and Performance

Security and performance are two of the largest concerns companies have for outsourcing any IT function. The concerns are magnified when considering a public cloud offering with shared resources like Cloud Enterprise.

Hosting.com developed Cloud Enterprise to be the most secure cloud hosting solution on the market, and many advances in virtualization technology make this possible within multi-tenant environments. Cloud Enterprise provides clients with a segmented and partitioned slice of infrastructure. Each client is provided with individual IP ranges, secure firewalls with individually set rules and networking rules that are set and maintained separately from any other slice.

"Our security on Cloud Enterprise may be stronger than in our dedicated environment. It was definitely a concern - until we tested it and realized how secure the solution is," noted Rennie.

Many providers tell prospects that their cloud solutions will outperform traditional hosted solutions; convincing them is an entirely different undertaking. During the migration, Webiplex left their dedicated solution running while finalizing the move to Cloud Enterprise and had an opportunity to test one against the other. "I cannot explain all the technicalities precisely, but everything basically just got faster. Our cloud solution - and even our database server - outperformed our dedicated solution," added Rennie.

Rapid scalability, increased management capabilities, built-in fault tolerance and redundancy, and effective pricing all influenced Webiplex's decision to choose Cloud Enterprise. But, the single most important concern for any consumer of hosted services will always be infrastructure reliability.

"I don't even think about infrastructure downtime anymore. Our solutions with Hosting.com have never been down. More importantly, our clients have never lost access to our services because of an infrastructure or hosting failure," summarized Rennie.

Contact a Hosting.com Account Specialist to discuss Cloud Enterprise, Hosting.com's Cloud Computing Hosting Solution: Online Form, 1.888.894.4678, or Live Chat.