Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Innotas provides cloud-based IT governance and portfolio management solutions for IT organizations. Founded in 2000, the company has secured a funding of $23.70 million from ArrowPath Venture Partners and Velocity Venture Capital.

It may seem like a given that a company in the business of providing cloud-based solutions for project and application portfolio management would have its own data hosted in the cloud. However, when I was establishing the first Innotas data center in the year 2000, infrastructure still meant hardware.

Then as now, servers, platforms and the people to manage them were costly—and difficult to scale. So that's why my organization is now in the process of transitioning from our traditional data center to Amazon Web Services(AWS) to improve our velocity for making changes and reacting to customer needs, while also reducing costs and offering features that would be cost-prohibitive in our current hosted environment.

While the transition itself is a significant undertaking, the benefits in terms of scalability, global reach and providing support for our company's rapid growth have already paid dividends in the form of cost savings and new clients.

Scalability Improves Responsiveness to Business Needs

When operating from our original co-located data center, scaling essentially meant purchasing new hardware. We had to forecast maximum customer traffic needs months in advance. Setting up new servers required months from procurement, to burn-in, to configuration, to go-live. After all that, if sales spiked, it was a scramble to add more capacity. Conversely, if sales dropped, we had unused capacity that was already paid for.

Today, with AWS, we can add server capacity in mere minutes. Machine images, or templates, allow us to quickly fire up a new app server and add it to the mix. The process can even be automated to respond if sales spike. The best part is that if we don't use the capacity, we can simply turn off the virtual machines—and turn off the cost. Planning can be far more fluid and we can react to current sales conditions immediately.

New Capabilities Wow Customers
AWS also allows us to offer our customers features that we otherwise could not afford to host, because we would have to scale for the worst-case scenario.

For example, it is now possible to set up Customer Previews of products and new features. Using our own hardware, it would simply cost too much to create a test environment with customer data to enable a test drive of our latest new releases. However, with AWS, we simply provision a new environment for a few weeks, then dispose of it. Customers can see the new features in action with their own data before we upgrade their production copy; the cost is minimal since we only pay for a few weeks' of the machines' runtime.

This ability to create test environments on the fly and preview products has been a huge win with our customers—and allows us to deploy a larger set of changes with each release, without worry about the potential impact on customers.

The Global Cloud Expands Global Reach

With a traditional data center, you are limited to that physical location. While Innotas had eventually expanded from our initial Sacramento data center to establish one in Canada, it was a lengthy process.

Today, we can set up instances of our application at any of Amazon's data centers around the world—and it is just as simple as it would be to do it locally. We have already grown our data center presence to four different countries using AWS and it's simple to respond to customers' legal or security needs to host data near their location. For example, as we grow sales in Australia, we have the flexibility to scale up our presence in Amazon's Sydney-based data center accordingly.

Distance becomes a non-issue when moving data among Amazon's network; it offers us the ability to be global, while managing the data as if it's local. In addition, the internal throughput capability of Amazon's network is simply astounding. It would be cost-prohibitive to set up a global network that could match AWS's speed and responsiveness.

Room to Innovate, Streamline and Grow
As we re-architect to take advantage of all that AWS can offer, it is clear we are just scratching the surface of the potential of this solution. For our company, it is been a game-changer—and it could transform the shape, scope and scalability of your organization as well.