Neudesic gains a competitive edge through its customer focus

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Scalability, uptime, and cost savings are key ingredients for success

When Allrecipes.com, the food-focused online social networking service, was looking for a way to modernize its platform, Neudesic helped the organization evaluate options. Allrecipes.com had provisioned its on-premises infrastructure across seven datacenters to handle maximum web traffic, which tended to occur around major holidays. The organization decided to adopt a Platform as a Service solution because it addressed a myriad of concerns, from scalability, to resiliency, to cost. “Initially, we were looking at modernizing their solution by using more of an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)-based approach, but when we did the analysis, it was very obvious to us that we could save them money. We could increase the reliability and the scalability based on the Azure platform if we went with a more PaaS (Platform as a Service)-based approach,” states Jason Noble, Vice President of Neudesic’s Digital Platform Group. By scaling services as demand required, Allrecipes.com benefited from increased performance, significant cost savings, and more rapid development.

Allrecipes.com’s modernization efforts also necessitated a change in how it built and deployed software. Neudesic introduced its customer to more advanced DevOps capabilities, such as AV switching, which allows more effective deployments by enabling easy roll back in the event of deployment issues. This feature accelerated Allrecipes.com’s software delivery capabilities and reduced their overall infrastructure management costs.

Azure-built solutions deliver customer business innovation

“Platform services for us is really the starting point,” insists Noble. “When we look at modernization, of course we consider lift and shift, but we always look for opportunities to go with PaaS because we know that's the future.”

Neudesic cites a multitude of benefits in Azure Application platform for both itself and its customers, including the familiarity of the solutions, the common developer tool set, the reliability and the scalability, and the in-built security. Neudesic also sees multi-platform as a huge opportunity for DevOps on Azure. Noble asserts “The cool thing about it is that it's not just about .NET now. We have support for Node. We can run Java apps. We can run any platform within Microsoft's cloud. That's huge because as we know the way that apps are created today is not necessarily just on a single platform.”

Azure Application platform solutions are fast to provision and provide a solid base for building repeatable solutions. Azure Marketplace enables Neudesic to build, deploy and refine applications quickly. According to Noble, “We're able to pull down solutions that are already a part of the marketplace, plug them into our infrastructure or into our solution, and we're up and running.”

Repeatable solutions framework accelerates customer value

While Microsoft handles infrastructure and provides consumable services, Neudesic focuses on improving the way in which it helps its customers execute their core business. A managed-services approach is one key way in which Neudesic helps its customers.

“Very few clients want the burden of having a custom piece of software written for them and then being expected to manage it and to run it… They just want a custom solution built by Neudesic, where Neudesic ultimately owns the management, the upkeep, and the support of that particular solution,” says Marshall.

This has led Neudesic to develop its own the repeatable framework for application development. Marshall continues, “We essentially have a toolbox that allows us to accelerate the deployment of the next client.” With this framework, Neudesic aims to support the digital transformation of its customers in a holistic way.

Neudesic created five service lines to digitize each customer’s value proposition. Ultimately, this holistic process allows Neudesic to build a deeper partnership with its customer and deploy more technologies.

“One of the nice things about us going to market with digital business focus is that we're focused on business transformation which pulls together all of our services depending on what problem we're ultimately looking to solve. By us going to market with digital evolution as our key focus, we're able to sell everything,” says Marshall.

Growing the business with data analysis

While cloud application development will continue to be a cornerstone of Neudesic’s revenue growth, it is also investing heavily in Advanced Analytics. “Within the last 18 months, we've started to hire data scientists on staff, who are really focused on those advanced workloads, specifically in data,” says Noble. Although Neudesic attests that the visualization aspect of advanced analytics is important, it believes that the modern data platform and the data science workbench are where it will be able to differentiate its services.

“We're extremely excited about where technology is at, having Microsoft as a partner, going to market with Microsoft and enabling bigger and better solutions for our clients,” maintains Noble. Ultimately, Neudesic sees Azure Application platform as the basis for many of the solutions it will build in the foreseeable future.

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