DCI Saves 27% on Cloud Costs, Gains Support for Long-Term Growth Using AWS
Digital Commerce Intelligence (DCI) was founded in 2018 in Singapore and has offices in both Singapore and Greece. DCI provides businesses with intelligence on market trends, competition, and brand performance that allows them to plan corporate strategy based on data. As DCI grew, it was hindered by a lack of flexibility and high costs from its previous cloud provider. The company migrated to AWS in 6 months using the AWS Startup Program. The migration reduced its monthly cloud costs by 27 percent, and DCI now has the tools and support it needs to achieve long-term success.
“Lower costs mean we can spend more on people and on product development — things that make the business more competitive.”
Konstantinos Kitsaras, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Commerce Intelligence
Cloud Nomads, an Advanced Partner of AWS, helped Digital Commerce Intelligence (DCI) achieve significant cost savings and support for long-term growth by leveraging the power of AWS. With Cloud Nomads’ expertise, DCI was able to implement cost-optimization strategies that reduced its monthly cloud expenses by 27%. Cloud Nomads also provided ongoing support and guidance, ensuring DCI was able to fully leverage the benefits of AWS and achieve its business goals.
The story behind the migration
Founded in 2018 in Singapore, DCI saw that ecommerce businesses in Southeast Asia were operating blind and making decisions on intuition rather than data. DCI makes timely ecommerce market intelligence available to businesses to help them make better commercial decisions, providing insights on market sizing, trends, competition, and brand performance to customers throughout Southeast Asia.
As DCI grew, its previous cloud provider lacked the flexibility it needed, resulting in unpredictable compute and database costs. The company migrated to AWS in 6 months using the AWS Startup Program, which offers a broad range of support to startups as they launch, grow, and scale. DCI’s participation in AWS Activate — which offers free tools, resources, and more to help startups quickly begin using AWS — meant it could move fast, using guidance from its account team and AWS support engineers.
“If you’re selling products online, you need to know if you’re doing it as fast as your competitors, or if you’re a leader, in last place, or in the middle,” says Kyriakos Zannikos, founder and CEO at DCI. “Our solutions give you that critical information.”
DCI was a little more than two years old when an investor suggested the company migrate to AWS to avoid the kind of billing issues it had with its previous provider. “We are a startup — we cannot have a resource dedicated to managing the cloud service charges,” says Zannikos. “That’s not our focus. We’re trying to build our product.”
DCI migrated its data collection tools, SQL Server, messaging queue, Kubernetes clusters, image registry, and compute to AWS, and is now running about 65 percent of its systems on AWS, with plans to migrate the rest once its remaining tools are updated. “In contrast to our previous provider, AWS provides a feature-rich and configurable cloud experience,” says Cavan David, software development lead at DCI. “With the help of the AWS team, we were able to migrate our systems to AWS in a couple of months with just a team of two engineers and without a lot of DevOps know-how.”
DCI also found that AWS’s support helped it make better choices overall. “We wanted to have an account manager from our cloud services provider who could guide us,” says Kitsaras. “We wanted someone to help us select the right services, evaluate our architecture, and evaluate workloads. Someone who would share knowledge with us. We got that from AWS.”
Results
DCI uses Amazon RDS for SQL Server to ingest and process data, Amazon EC2 for secure and resizable compute capacity, and Amazon S3 for object storage. Amazon CloudWatch has been added to gain observability of its AWS resources and applications.
- 27% reduction in monthly cloud costs
- ~65% of systems migrated within 6 months
- Improved insight into cloud usage
- Improved customer support and guidance
“We now have a deeper understanding of how we use our cloud services,” says Kitsaras. “The insights we get from CloudWatch, for example, help us react quickly to any infrastructure issues that may affect our customers. We also have responsive support to help us if we ever have a question. As a market intelligence company, we see the value of what we’ve gained by using AWS.”