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Customer Story

Lift & Shift Migration Makes IT More Cost-Effective for Software Provider

Advanced — a dynamic business software and services provider — migrated its Marketplace software to a bespoke cloud solution, resulting in a cheaper and more efficient IT infrastructure

Related services
Cloud 

Industry
Public & Utilities

Company
Xebia

Advanced is a dynamic business software and services provider with a 330m GBP turnover, 25,000+ customers and 2,700 employees. The company provides enterprise and market-focused solutions that allow its customers to reimagine what is possible, innovate in their sectors and improve the lives of millions of people. It delivers focused solutions for public sector, enterprise, commercial and health & care organizations that simplify complex business challenges and deliver immediate value. Advanced has a Cloud-first strategy that enables customers to drive efficiencies, make informed decisions, act with pace and meet challenges head-on.

Why
Advanced was over-dependent on 3rd party hosting, costing the business money and time
What
The company decided to migrate hosting to a self-managed solution on AWS
How
Infrastructure costs were reduced by a quarter, while new development became more efficient

Managed Hosting Not Cost-Effective

Advanced has consistently grown its product portfolio through a thoughtful acquisition strategy, resulting in a vast IT estate of different environments. The company’s existing managed cloud hosting gave limited access to the IT infrastructure, with a high financial and time cost. The deployment of new features was dependent on a third party, so any changes needed to be coordinated with them.

After acquiring Advanced Marketplace, the company decided to move to a bespoke in-house solution to better control and manage its infrastructure, with improved stability and scalability. This in-house solution would allow Advanced to develop new features autonomously and, most importantly, at a lower cost.

Lifted and Shifted to AWS

Advanced chose to migrate its IT infrastructure to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud. With Xebia’s expertise, the core of Advanced Marketplace was moved in just eleven months using a lift-and-shift approach. Part of the cost optimization was the move of the database engine from Oracle to the open-source Postgres, with its more beneficial licensing cost structure.

Alongside AWS, Advanced employed layered architecture management to allow better system customization and increased functionality, and network peering to manage traffic peaks and troughs more efficiently and at no extra cost.

“We have worked with Xebia for several years across many technically-challenging projects and they always deliver. I highly recommend working with their vast number of experts across all services and disciplines.”
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Liam Mitchell Head of Cloud Enablement, Advanced

Increased Efficiency at Lower Cost

The teams worked as one, using Scrum for daily tasks and lively knowledge exchange, to complete the lift-and-shift migration of Advanced’s infrastructure to the AWS cloud.

With the improvements in the CI/CD process, Advanced can now develop and deploy new features far more efficiently. There has been a 25% reduction in the company’s infrastructure costs, and it now only takes thirty seconds to switch to another database in case of failure, giving greater peace of mind.

Advanced now also has a fully-trained operations team capable of autonomously managing the new infrastructure, thanks to Xebia’s expert knowledge transfer.

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