SADA helps Axonify deliver customer satisfaction with Google Cloud

Speedy ramp-up, up-skilling and continuous training of frontline employees are vital for business success. Today’s consumers are savvier than ever, and they expect customer support staff  providing in-person service to be prepared with sharp skills and flawless knowledge. To help companies ensure their frontline workers are at the top of their game, Axonify developed a fun, fast and personalized way to boost on-the-job performance by making critical information stick. For the past decade, Axonify’s training platform has delivered knowledge-building experiences to users in the way humans learn best–consuming focused, bite-sized bursts of information–for just three to five minutes a day.

By serving up employer-specific content into employees’ workflows and reinforcing behaviors, Axonify improves their customer experience by ensuring employees are well-versed and confident in the products and services they sell. This modern learning solution is currently deployed by more than 160 customers in 150 countries, including Bloomingdale’s, Levi’s and Merck.

Business challenge

Axonify was born cloud native to Amazon Web Services (AWS). But like many cloud native providers that serve the retail industry, the company increasingly felt pressured not to deal with their customers’ direct competition–Amazon. To eliminate its conflict of interest and increase customer peace of mind, Axonify made a strategic decision to cut the cord with AWS and move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We do so much business in the retail industry, and a lot of our customers can be quite vocal about the commercial angle of competing with Amazon, yet we were writing a check to the company for hosting their data on AWS. That principle was difficult to swallow for some CIOs,” said Phil Menary, Senior Vice President of Software Development at Axonify. 

“At one point, we were debating adopting a multiple cloud provider model, but it just made more sense to fully make a switch. There’s a lot more value when you lean into a platform rather than keeping yourself insulated from the technology you’re using.”

Evan Kirkland | VP of Software Development

Solution  

Axonify performed extensive due diligence and met with many leading cloud hosting providers, including Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. To complicate the choice, Axonify operates data centers in the US, EU, and APAC regions, making it mandatory to execute each phase of the migration geography by geography. The chosen vendor would need to be up to the task with global support.

“The Google folks were great and quick to engage. They brought in an architect and really tried to help us understand what they were offering and what was possible on GCP,” said Menary. “It was a level of service we hadn’t been receiving from AWS.”

“We were reviewing the AWS infrastructure as code requirements we needed, and I recall they asked, ‘If we could wave a magic wand and have some people here tomorrow to help you with this, would you do it?’. “Of course, the answer was ‘yes,’ and Google Cloud brought in their top partner, SADA.”

Evan Kirkland | VP of Software Development

SADA, a Google Cloud Premier partner and two-time Global Partner of the Year award winner, came on board ready to put its expertise to work. SADA’s Google Cloud certified experts got right to it, reviewing the existing AWS environment to migrate Axonify’s data to GCP for developer testing. Based on the AWS configuration, SADA developed the equivalent GCP architecture.  

“SADA really augments what Google Cloud provides. It’s quite impressive,” said Menary. “We’re extremely happy to have SADA and Google Cloud on our side when we have questions or need hands-on help busting through an obstacle or a configuration. It’s a real advantage to have them on our team.”   

Results

SADA helped migrate 165 servers and 40 terabytes of relational databases across the three diverse production environments from AWS to GCP within six months. With SADA’s team ready to help, if needed, Axonify achieved each migration in less than two hours.

Overall, SADA helped Axonify meet their customer demands and achieve its business objectives head-on by enabling them to:

• Migrate an AWS-based infrastructure to GCP architecture
• Import to and export from the existing AWS development environment
• Validate User Acceptance Testing (UAT) 
• Leverage Kubernetes for AI and machine learning workloads

“Moving from a platform that we’ve been operating on for years to another platform could have been risky, but SADA de-risked the transition for us and prevented us from making any newbie mistakes,” said Menary.