Pile & Company

Challenge

Pile & Company is a management consulting firm that helps clients make their marketing resources and relationships better. With a strong commitment to technology infrastructure the management team decided moving to a scalable cloud based platform was a smart move in order to support all 5 of their internal sites. Pile hosts multiple blogs and other sites such as In House Agency Forum and Communications Collaborative. This infrastructure needed to be migrated in order to reduce maintenance and hosting costs as well as make deployments and site management easier.

Solution

Cloud Construct was contracted to help Pile & Company re-architect the web elements of their infrastructure and also retire non essential servers and databases. With around 4 separate servers being maintained onsite at a traditional hosting cost we were able to drastically reduce that cost by moving them to the Windows Azure cloud hosting model. Windows Azure provided data redundancy, scalability, and ease of management. Secondly, we streamlined many offline process by integrating with Bullhorn CRM API.

Technical Solutions

Migrating multiple databases to the cloud with staging and production configurations drastically simplified the Pile & Company's infrastructure footprint. Next we placed all existing websites into Windows Azure Websites so we could easily deploy from Visual Studio Online and take advantage of the scalability and reliability of the platform. IT management costs went way down because we retired four servers and we are now able to manage all assets from a single location. Changes are published through the appropriate environments and approved by stakeholders before going live. Bullhorn Jobs API was utilized to retire old servers and make employee tasks much simpler on a day to day basis. We also added the ability for mail to be sent in a much easier fashion by implementing SendGrid as well. One improvement that is still to be added is a Content Delivery Network for faster image loading across sites.

Results

Pile & Company and Cloud Construct's relationship has strengthened even more over the past few months as all assets have now been migrated to Windows Azure and overhead of management has gone drastically down. The Cloud Construct team has engaged in more technical projects with Pile and their affiliates while they continue to add more features and functionality for their clients.