LoadSpring expands global footprint with Google Cloud and SADA

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/ AT A GLANCE

Turning to Google Cloud and SADA not only led LoadSpring to a solution but to a strategic alliance.

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INDUSTRY

Software & Technology

ACHIEVED

Performance parity with on-prem VMware out of the box

SAVED

Months worth of time

As a global leader in hosting, integrating and providing access to software applications and their accompanying data for project and asset-intensive organizations, LoadSpring Solutions helps businesses that are performing impactful work in a variety of industries, including engineering and construction, departments of transportation, manufacturing, healthcare and life sciences. Whether they’re designing and building nuclear power plants, skyscrapers or bridges, organizations rely on the LoadSpring Cloud Platform to make their teams’ jobs easier. Too often, project managers are left to contend with siloed apps and data, interfering with their ability to execute high-quality projects on-time and on-budget. LoadSpring provides them with a complete view of their business and projects, enabling them to more seamlessly bring large-scale projects that the public relies on to life.

“We lead the market in hosting project management solutions in the cloud,” said Stacey Witt, CMO at LoadSpring. “We enable project managers to leverage their powers of innovation and their companies to increase user adoption and ROI. The LoadSpring Cloud Platform is the access, user management, security point and reporting platform that empowers our customers to authenticate into the applications that we host for them.”

LoadSpring started out running its platform on physical hosts then moved to on-prem VMware in a private cloud from collocated facilities. But in the back of the LoadSpring team’s minds, they knew that someday, as their global footprint expanded, they would need to run on a hybrid cloud to scale and meet the needs of customers around the world, many in remote regions. The team’s optimistic outlook on the direction of the business would prove to be well-founded. 

Business challenge

Just as they had anticipated, the LoadSpring team eventually found themselves in a position where they needed to rapidly scale to serve their quickly growing customer base. LoadSpring’s customers operate worldwide and expect the same performance, whether in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East or Pan-Asia. The quest to uncover the best solution to meet the needs of global customers initially proved to be daunting. And VMware licensing presented an obstacle.

“Software vendors’ esoteric licensing practices are one of my biggest challenges,” shared Cameron Vixie, CTO of LoadSpring. “I’m always asking myself, ‘Can I use the licenses we already own in Japan or Australia, or do I need to purchase a different SKU?’ It creates a lot of management headaches for me. I joke that I need a PhD in license management to follow all these rules!”

To make things even more complicated, COVID-19 restrictions kept LoadSpring from sending engineers to collocated facilities in some regions. As a result, the company was concerned they wouldn’t be able to roll out LoadSpring Cloud in those areas in a timely manner. With global demand rising throughout the world for LoadSpring’s managed cloud services, Vixie knew they would need a high-performance solution that not only had a global presence but that would also help accelerate customer benefits.

Solution

LoadSpring had previously looked into using AWS, Azure and Oracle, but determined that those platforms were unable to match the performance of their colocated VMware solution. LoadSpring was initially attracted to the ubiquity of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which made LoadSpring’s mission to quickly roll out their own platform much easier. The company also cites Google Cloud’s advanced capabilities as a major factor in their decision making. 

“Taking advantage of Google Cloud’s global presence was a big driver for us, as well as being able to start to tie in to some of the research and development that Google has been doing around AI and business intelligence,” said Vixie. “The ability to leverage capabilities in those areas instead of starting from ground zero ourselves is a big advantage.”

Lift and shift to Google Cloud VMware Engine 

The ability to leverage GCP and Google Cloud VMware Engine to lift and shift LoadSpring’s full technology stack was a big relief for Vixie. They partnered with SADA, a two-time Google Cloud Global Partner of the Year, to build out the infrastructure to migrate LoadSpring from on-prem VMware. After SADA created a landing zone in GCP, LoadSpring was able to shift their workloads to the new environment. Google Cloud VMware Engine provides LoadSpring with both the capability of serving customers’ applications and supporting disaster recovery. In fact, the disaster recovery capability is how LoadSpring went live on the service.

“Migration to the Google Cloud VMware Engine was as simple as failing over during a disaster recovery drill. I simply replicated all my virtual machines on the service and pushed the button to failover.” 

Cameron Vixie, CTO of LoadSpring

An end to the licensing conundrum 

GCP now also handles VMware licensing for LoadSpring, so Vixie can concentrate on making a better product for his customers. “Whereas it was complicated to deal with VMware licensing on my own, with GCP, I can easily make arrangements to begin operating in a certain geography, for example, Japan, and start shortly thereafter. Having GCP work with VMware makes my life easier,” said Vixie. “It lets me get back to my passion of optimizing LoadSpring for an even better project management experience.”

Results

Achieving performance parity to on-prem VMWare out of the box

After spinning up LoadSpring Cloud Platform on the service, Vixie and his team came away very impressed that Google Cloud VMware Engine measures up to on-prem VMware out of the box. Over the years, LoadSpring has optimized the performance of their platform in on-prem data centers—it’s their secret sauce. “We’ve spent hundreds of hours tuning the performance of LoadSpring in our facilities until it was top notch,” said Vixie. “At the end of this buildout, we’ve been able to match that great performance. I anticipated good things from GCP, but these early results surpassed even my most optimistic expectations!”

Achieving performance parity with Google Cloud VMware Engine is very important to the project managers who rely on LoadSpring’s finely tuned infrastructure for ultra performance. The LoadSpring team knows great performance when they see it because they baseline critical business processes within the applications they host. 

“Our customers’ project managers are very performance conscious, and these actions can impact their productivity enormously. But because Google Cloud VMware Engine provides high-performance computing resources, we were able to migrate without negatively impacting customer performance.”

Cameron Vixie, CTO of LoadSpring

Leveraging Google Cloud’s global footprint

In addition, GCP’s worldwide footprint means LoadSpring doesn’t need boots on the ground. After dealing with five collocation facility closures/relocations in the past five years, Vixie is thrilled that LoadSpring can depend on GCP to provide a consistent, stable environment. “Setting up a new data center overseas and migrating customers can take months,” said Vixie. “I’m looking forward to not taking so many 18-hour flights now that we’ve migrated to Google Cloud.”

Forming a strategic alliance

Turning to Google Cloud and SADA not only led LoadSpring to a solution but to a strategic alliance. The three companies are collaborating to provide clients with enhanced project analytics via AI and business intelligence solutions. LoadSpring is combining its application, support and project expertise with SADA’s delivery expertise and Google Cloud’s infrastructure, solutions and capabilities in AI and ML to help clients eliminate risks while increasing their insights and data access to make critical business and project decisions in real-time.

Overall, SADA and Google Cloud enabled LoadSpring to:

  • Expand their global footprint to meet the needs of customers worldwide
  • Achieve performance parity to on-prem VMWare out of the box 
  • Resolve issues with VMware licensing abroad—Google Cloud handles it all
  • Save months worth of time and personnel resources by not having to send their engineers into remote regions to set up service
  • Help its clients expand their cloud, business intelligence and AI/ML capabilities to achieve better project results

“We’ve had a very good, collaborative process with SADA and Google,” said Vixie. “Together, with the combined strength of our offerings, we’re making a global impact by being able to deliver best-in-class cloud solutions that are transformational for our clients, no matter where they are in the world.”

We’ve spent hundreds of hours tuning the performance of LoadSpring in our facilities until it was top notch. At the end of this buildout, we’ve been able to match that great performance. I anticipated good things from GCP, but these early results surpassed even my most optimistic expectations!"

— Cameron Vixie, CTO of LoadSpring

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