The experience and expertise of the Akamai team allowed them to be more than just a vendor. They are a trusted partner and advisor not only to us, but also to many of the world’s largest brands.”
Rajkumar Ganapathy, CTO, Zolvit
Introduction
My name is Rajkumar Ganapathy, and I am the Chief Technology Officer at a large services provider. Our primary vision is to make it easier for business owners to establish and maintain compliance with the government. We offer a platform with end-to-end workflows designed to put the power in the hands of business owners. We serve hundreds of thousands of businesses from all over the country, and each one speaks regional languages in addition to English. This adds complexity to our infrastructure because we need to address customers in those various languages.
Business Challenge
We have always been a cloud-first company, although as time went on and our use of cloud infrastructure expanded, we began facing challenges. The main thorn in our side was that our cloud costs became very difficult to predict and control. At the same time, support was increasingly lacking, and delivering sub-second application responses to our customers remained a challenge. We needed to make a change.
Evaluation
We knew our challenges and we knew what we wanted. The hard part was finding a provider that could offer it all without compromises. The criteria that we evaluated for each cloud provider were cost, simple pricing structure, developer support, and higher-throughput compute instances. We wanted to see our savings grow, not our costs, and more reliably budget for those costs. We needed an engaged support team with Linux and open source expertise. And we feverishly sought the sub-second response times that come with higher-throughput compute instances.
When looking to reduce and gain control of our costs, we knew we needed to move away from the hyperscalers, and began looking at other providers. However, we quickly found that we would end up sacrificing the performance and support we sought in order to achieve the lower, more predictable costs. Our decision appeared to be a matter of priorities, concessions, and trade-offs. Then we were introduced to Akamai, who really offered the best of both worlds.
With Akamai, we now enjoy savings that scale, we delight our end customers, and we maintain the freedom to bring or build using our own tools and features. All the while, the Akamai support team has been available 24/7 to provide expertise.
Rajkumar Ganapathy, CTO, Zolvit
Transformation Story
The closer we looked, the more Akamai stood out from the other providers. First, they offered transparent and predictable pricing that we could control. Previously, our cloud bills ballooned as we served more customers. With Akamai, our savings came as a surprise — a very pleasant one. On top of that, we are an open source company, and choosing Akamai allowed us to bring our own tools and configurations to the platform. We didn’t need to worry about limitations or vendor lock-ins anymore. Further, the migration was still a large undertaking, but the support we received from Akamai’s 24/7/365 global team made our lives much easier. When we scaled with other providers, the support was lacking. In contrast, Akamai excelled. We were quickly pleased, as were our customers when they noticed the improved application response times driven by Akamai’s high-throughput compute instances.
The experience and expertise of the Akamai team allowed them to be more than just a vendor. They are a trusted partner and advisor not only to us, but also to many of the world’s largest brands. They have extensive experience delivering high-value applications to users around the globe.
Our choice to partner with Akamai felt like a no-brainer.
Results
With Akamai, we have achieved so much in just a short time. Most notably, we have cut our costs in half. With reduced egress fees and zero commitments, we can avoid costs that we were previously subjected to without control. Budgeting has become far more simple, and gone are the days of tense after-the-fact conversations with our finance department.
In addition to the cost savings, Akamai’s high-throughput compute instances have achieved the sub-second application responses we were looking for. Our customers have been incredibly happy.
My advice for any businesses operating in the cloud is to stay away from proprietary solutions as much as possible. In the beginning, it might appear easier and less time-consuming, but using proprietary solutions leads to vendor lock-in, making it difficult for you to use your own tools or switch to another provider.
With Akamai, we now enjoy savings that scale, we delight our end customers, and we maintain the freedom to bring or build using our own tools and features. All the while, the Akamai support team has been available 24/7 to provide expertise. We have left vendor lock-in behind us, and unlocked greater potential. We are excited to see this partnership continue to grow.
Talk to an Akamai cloud expert to learn more, and you’ll receive cloud credits to try the platform at no cost to you.
