VX Company uses CloudBees PaaS to give back to Aids victims in Africa
Reducing Operating Expenses 30% and Customer Support Time 90%
Paris, France – July 17, 2012 – CloudBees, Inc., the Java Platform as a Service (PaaS) innovation leader, today announced that VX Company, a Netherlands-based provider of IT services to customers around the globe, has selected the CloudBees platform to re-develop their Soweto application into a cloud-based SaaS. The Soweto application was developed by VX Company as a way to give back to the AIDS-ravaged African countries. It is used by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Africa to monitor AIDS patients and caregivers, as well as maintain records of home visits. The software is used by more than 85 different NGOs, all affiliated with Soweto Care System.
When VX Company originally developed Soweto, it was a desktop application. The problem they faced was that some NGOs didn’t have in-house IT staff to support the computing infrastructure. As a result, many NGOs were using various older versions of Soweto, mandating that VX Company support multiple versions.
“We knew that in order to get Soweto into the hands of every NGO who wanted access to it we had to redevelop the application as a SaaS, hosted on-premise,” said Bas van Oudenaarde, technical manager, VX Company. Another challenge Bas and his team faced was that as usage amongst the NGOs in Africa grew, so did the need to scale up the computing infrastructure. VX Company had to make ongoing investments in additional hardware and software to support Soweto, something that was turning into an annual occurrence.
“Around this time, we realised the power, flexibility and ease-of-use the cloud could potentially offer to us,” explained Bas. “It was a realisation that hit at the right time, as our software factory was overloaded, particularly when trying to support peak customer demands.”
Using the CloudBees Platform, Bas redesigned Soweto to run in the cloud. In just a couple of months, he had re-built the entire software factory with cloud components. This time the CloudBees Platform – offering Jenkins in the cloud development services – was the central hub.
As a result of deploying the solution to the cloud as a SaaS, NGOs could easily utilise Soweto because they no longer had to rely on local IT resources to support the application. “We have eliminated the ongoing infrastructure investments as well as the associated maintenance and operational costs,” said Erik Zeillemaker, Business Unit Manager. “We now operate within a PaaS environment managed by specialists who really know the ins and outs of their services. That frees us up to focus on what we do best: develop high quality software.”
Some of the benefits VX Company experienced from using the CloudBees Platform include:
· Operating expenses reduced up to 30 percent
· Customer support time reduced nearly 90 percent
· Less infrastructure maintenance
· New projects for perspective clients set up in minutes
· Extensibility via the CloudBees Partner Ecosystem
As a result of the success VX Company had with the Soweto project, the company has continued to use CloudBees for new projects.
“VX Company is a perfect example of how a company can benefit from the CloudBees platform while, at the same time, automatically leverage the value provided by the cloud,” said Francois Dechery, vice president of international development, CloudBees. “By using the CloudBees services, VX Company was able to eliminate the ongoing infrastructure investments they had to make, as well as perform the associated activities that go along with maintaining the infrastructure. Now they can simply focus on developing high quality software.”
For more information on how the VX Company implemented the CloudBees PaaS for its Soweto application, visit: http://www.cloudbees.com/case-study/vx-company.cb .
About VX Company
VX Company (http://www.vxcompany.com/), founded in 1988, is an IT service provider active in consultancy, projects and secondment in the field of Microsoft, Java, Oracle, OpenVMS, Unix and Linux. Almost 300 IT professionals work on the analysis, design, development, integration, testing and management of applications and computing infrastructures for many customers. Moreover VX Company is a specialist in the field of managed services and project management. The company is characterized by a culture in which the employee is the core of success. That’s why Computable named VX Company “Best ICT secondment company of the year,” “Best ICT employer,” and one of “the most powerful IT service providers in the Netherlands.”
About CloudBees
CloudBees (http://www.cloudbees.com/) is the only cloud company focused on servicing the complete Java application lifecycle for cloud development and deployment – without any servers, any virtual machines or any IT staff. The CloudBees platform today includes DEV@cloud, a service that lets developers take their build and test environments to the cloud, and RUN@cloud, which lets teams seamlessly deploy applications to production in the cloud.
CloudBees is also the world’s premier expert on Jenkins, the most widely used continuous integration server. The company offers a Jenkins service as part of DEV@cloud, as well as an on-premise enterprise solution, Nectar, which is available as a subscription. Backed by Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, CloudBees was founded in 2010 by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey and an elite technology team.
