About Smartme
Smartme Analytics’s Big Data technology gathers real behavioral data from users and provides accurate audience information and competitive intelligence to international businesses, agencies and marketing leaders.
The company’s software monitors thousands of users through their smartphones in order to better understand their behavior, analyzing what they really do instead of just looking at what they say or what they remember. The millions of data points generated are then processed and categorized with Smartme’s own data mining methodology, obtaining useful in-depth insights to directly apply to your business. This is supplemented with declarative data in order to provide more veracity to clients’ analysis and optimizes the research process. Smartme Analytics turns the information into a key factor in the creation and implementation of competitive analysis, audience discovery, and business strategies, increasing drastically their efficiency.
Challenge
Smartme operates in a vertical where smart use of the Cloud is imperative. As with many high-growth startups, Smartme was focused on building their product while also developing their business. With limited personnel, Cloud expertise and a lack of visibility into costs and analytics, Smartme turned to CloudZone for guidance and support on how to efficiently manage their Cloud & its costs
Solution
Having registered CloudZone as Smartme’s official partner on record with AWS enabled CloudZone to provide them with a range of services, at no extra cost. This included a dedicated team that consisted of a Customer Success Manager, a Solutions Architect, and a FinOps Analyst, as well as access to a Cloud management platform (CloudHealth).
To boost Cloud operations and reduce costs, CloudZonet provided consulting and training in several areas:
- Business advice on various topics including fund requests, focal points, billing issues, and more.
- A Well Architected Review according to AWS and Security best practices to ensure their Cloud usage is optimal on all accounts
- CloudHealth training on how to customize reports & alerts, right-sizing, cost-saving and saving plans
After analyzing Smartme’s costs, CloudZone’s FinOps experts worked with Smartme’s team to reduce their Cloud costs. Thier recommendations inclueded:
- Right-sizing – to ensure they are using the most suitable and up-to-date instances.
- Delete unattached instance memory, which wasted resources
- A 1-year commitment savings plan that would cover 68% of their total EC2, Fargate and Lambda environment.
- Implementing RDS IOPS
In addition, CloudZone’s FinOps team set up reports and alerts to make sure the Smartme team can stay on top of their Cloud spend.
Results
Working with CloudZone was a game changer for Smartme in terms of savings. The company was able to cut their Cloud costs by no less than 20%.
- Thanks to the new savings plan recomended by CloudZone, Smartme reached $7.3k of savings per year.
- Following CloudZone’s suggestion to modify Smartme’s io1 volumes into gp3, the company was able to receive 3,000 free IOPS.
- The reports, analytics and alerts set by CloudZone’s FinOps experts meant that Smartme’s internal team now has full visibility into their Cloud spend and efficiency, opening the door to even greater savings and optimization in the future.
- As Smartme gained deeper knowledge, training, and systems through their work with CloudZone, they now have a set methodology they can leverage and scale, rather than working “on the fly” as before.
Smartme’s CTO, Ignacio Minarro said: “CloudZone helped us to go from handling our cloud infrastructure on the go to experiencing more confidence and understanding and leveraging Cloud technology for our business and products. As a Big Data company, finally having clarity and visibility into our analytics is priceless. CloudZone’s FinOps experts have helped us achieve 20% in savings.
