Hi, so I'm here to introduce Tomer Mekti, head of infrastructure at Sandys and one of
our customers.
I've been actually a beta customer, then transitioned into a GA customer, and I'd like to ask
you some questions, Tomer, about your experience with Velostrada.
And so let me begin with asking you a question, what was the business problems that you were
trying to solve before working with Velostrada?
So I would probably highlight two main challenges.
The first one is hardware procurement avoidance, which especially in remote sites, we had 20-plus
remote locations at Sandyscan as a head of infrastructure for me to be able to sustain
the business growth while reducing the hardware footprint was extremely challenging, especially
locations where I don't have any IT personnel.
The second one was related to engineering, shadow IT organizations that popping up everywhere
and our engineers obviously were engaging cloud providers and those solutions in most
of the cases weren't sustainable, right, from the cost perspective, from the management
perspective and from the information security perspective.
So we as an IT had to step in and provide more scalable, more proven solutions.
Yeah, and one of the reasons why shadow IT developed is because they wanted some resources
now, right, they can't wait.
Yeah, usually it's rapid deployment, right, it's multiple cases, it's like hyper-chromic
computer is a big thing, right, running simulations, being able to spin up VMs, right, very quickly,
primarily test environments for the engineering.
Yeah, great.
So you tried Velostrada, how did you actually use it in production?
Yeah, so we have implemented two use cases in production while having a couple of others
in the pipeline.
The first one was we have actually deployed an application, an engineering application
for our users in Korea and that was a typical case where instead of buying servers we just
procured licenses and we spin up the applications in the cloud and while using the database
that was running in our primary data center in the U.S. So that's a good case of just
avoiding buying hardware.
And the second one was, and the performance that you experienced, the performance was
acceptable, right, we haven't had any issues with performance.
Despite the fact that it was like a big, you know, latency between the...
Yeah, so we found the closest hub for AWS was in Japan, Japan and Korea has an excellent
infrastructure and below 20 milliseconds we could sustain it and it was perfectly acceptable
by the application owner.
Right.
So the second one was the QA test system for CRM which we've kind of, we had performance
related issues and we've deployed this environment using Velostrata in the cloud while our users
were in India, right, so they could feel it in much more reliable environment rather than
just remote desktop or Citrix to the U.S. based data center.
So those are two use cases, we had a couple of others in the pipeline.
That's great.
One more question, so if you kind of summarize the business benefits that you see from using
Velostrata both in the short term as well as in the long term.
Yeah, so on the tactical side, on the short term, right, obviously we avoided buying hardware,
right, so we had use cases where we didn't buy hardware.
So we've been told that it affected the hybrid cloud environment.
Yeah.
So we've improved the release, software release kind of timeline, right, for our engineers
by their spinning up VMs in more rapidly.
It's both agility and cost savings.
Yeah, so the cost saving was mostly on the hardware side, avoidance side, while on the
test and QA systems, it's more important that the speed is much, much, much more significant.
So in general, right, for the tactical side, right, being able to run your database, keep
your database on-prem and spin up as many VMs as you can in the cloud, right, without
impacting performance as a huge advantage, operational advantage.
On the more strategic side, right, it's, I truly believe that Vellstrata helped us to
put a foundation for hybrid cloud, right, so we basically finally could find a workable
solution, not the theoretical one, right, which, you know, we all know, right, there
are so many theoretical solutions out there, but this one has actually worked for us, so
we could really implement hybrid cloud infrastructure, right, and obviously, right, we increased
our, you know, our market share with engineers, right, which is very important for IT, right,
we gain more and more customers, and we provide the benefits of IT and leverage the scale
that we have.
So I would say this is, this is probably, you know, the most important benefit of putting
the foundation for hybrid.
So you think, basically, it's a strategic platform for enabling your hybrid cloud environment
and being able to leverage and balance what works in the cloud over some-prem and be able
to do it in a very agile way.
Yes, yes.
And actually being able to be dynamic, not only being able to be dynamic about it, but
actually being production-ready about it, because those are production VMs, it's not
just a couple of landscapes that we move to.
That's great, so, you know, thank you for being a great customer and for giving us all
this feedback that we're actually putting back into the product, and thanks a lot for
coming over here.
Thank you.
Thank you.
