Lightstream has helped the company double its AWS environment and optimize workload placement – all without a surge in costs.
Entrepreneurs Zach Holmquist and Shaun Ritchie were annoyed. Though they were working in different technology companies in Salt Lake City, Utah, both were experiencing the same problem: Every day, meetings were interrupted by other employees trying to use the conference room. Even if the room was scheduled on the internal calendar, there was no way to make the reservation easily visible to others in the company. This led to some awkward situations with clients, job candidates and visitors, not to mention a lack of space to sit and meet.
Holmquist, an application developer, drew upon his tech talents and created an app to solve the problem. That app caught on like wildfire, and Holmquist and friend Ritchie decided to start a company now known as Teem. Today, Teem is a cloud-based meeting-room booking system and workplace-analytics platform that offers organizations a “frictionless” way to optimize workspace and workspace experiences.
Business is booming for this SaaS-based provider, which now boasts more than 2,000 customers including big names like AirBnB and Trulia. As a born-in-the cloud company, Teem chose to build their business on AWS. While the technically savvy company was successfully managing its AWS infrastructure, it found – like many public-cloud customers – that costs were continually rising. That’s when Teem IT Operations called Lightstream to learn how to get a better handle on its growing AWS expenses.
A lunch meeting was quickly arranged between Teem’s Director of IT and Lighstream’s head of Cloud Engineering. They discussed Lightstream’s AWS practice and its robust consulting, workload optimization, security and cost containment services. An AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Lightstream provides a powerful combination of people, processes, and tools to help customers benefit from the scale and performance of the AWS cloud.
To get started, Lightstream suggested a full technical and financial analysis of Teem’s environment to help improve performance, sizing, cost savings, and security. Teem linked their AWS accounts to Lightstream and realized immediate savings as they implemented the recommendations.
Linking an organization’s AWS accounts does not affect or interrupt a company’s AWS environment or service in any way. Instead, Teem is now saving money and receiving expert support from a trusted cloud and networking advisor.
Lightstream covered specialized services such as a customized tagging strategy, continuous review and alignment of AWS Reserved Instances for performance and cost savings and recommendations to address security issues, notices and alerts. In addition, Lightstream offers Lightstream Connect, its proprietary intelligent billing analytics tool, as part of the service to provide a holistic view of a company’s AWS technology spend, including detailed reports and user-friendly dashboards.
The potential benefits were clear: the ability to develop a better product faster while saving costs.
Teem was particularly impressed by the level of reporting detail available by working with Lightstream. Not only would the company recognize considerable savings, optimize performance and improve security, Teem would be able to account costs down to project and product levels. These savings would enable Teem’s IT group to continue to focus on quality enhancements to their product with more AWS capacity. The benefits were evident: the ability to develop a better product faster while reducing costs.
It was a fortuitous decision. Since implementation, Teem has doubled its AWS environment over several quarters while its spend has only increased by 75%.
Today, the firm serves companies ranging from education to hospitality, including small startups and large corporations. Fueled by improved efficiencies in its AWS services, Teem continues to be a success story. About 20% of Inc.’s Best Places to Work use the company to optimize the convergence of places, people and technology in their organizations. Thanks to Lightstream, Teem is doing what they do best—only faster and less costly.
To learn more about how Lightstream can help optimize your organization’s public-cloud environment, fill out the form on the Contact Us page to sign up for a 30-minute demo.
