Workbench

https://f.hubspotusercontent20.net/hubfs/533526/Lancom2020/logos/img-logo-workbench-2.png

The Workbench journey to SaaS on Amazon Web Services

About Workbench

Workbench provides an application to the construction and civil contracting sectors. Their financial application for project management has been designed to provide greater accuracy and transparency when costing jobs. Workbench helps project managers maximise their resources and minimise risks in order to deliver against budgets and project profit margins.

"Lancom have exposed us to the opportunities that exist in the cloud world."
Clive Gardner / Director and Owner of Workbench

The challenge

On-Prem to Cloud

Workbench Application was developed 20 years ago, primarily as a client server on-premise application. The Workbench management team knew in order for the product to evolve, be easily deployed, maintained, supported and purchased, the application needed to be transformed to a cloud-based SaaS application. Their 1,000+ customers also needed to come on a migration journey to the cloud application.

Improve efficiency and use of resources

Having already started working on the AWS platform, Workbench had gone down the path of creating single client dedicated servers on AWS. This meant Workbench’s team were having to configure a new server instance for every new client they onboarded. This resulted in many instances that weren’t optimised and that were costing the business time and money to maintain.

Enable the ability to scale

In order to scale their software business, Workbench recognised they needed to change their processes to become more efficient. They also recognised they needed the help of an AWS partner. One specialising in application development, modernisation and that had SaaS experience.

The solution

Re-factor of the platform

Lancom's AWS certified architects carried out a thorough assessment of Workbench's existing AWS platform. The team recommended a re-factor of the platform to ensure the fundamentals were strong and robust and capable of supporting future growth.

Create a new auto scaling, secure and resilient environment

Lancom worked with Workbench to create a distributed, load balanced, auto scaling, secure and resilient environment. One that enabled the platform to automatically scale out, or back, based on the services being consumed by users, creating a unified platform for growth.

Automation

Lancom used the new environment to introduce automation to simplify and improve Workbenches existing processes. Client provisioning, feature updates, security rollouts, tenancy segregation to name a few areas, were all automated to provide an almost zero touch rollout, creating repeatable, efficient tasks that never failed or required manual human interaction.

The results

Increased efficiency

Having an optimised AWS environment has allowed this SaaS business to significantly reduce the time spent onboarding clients, as well as maintaining servers. Specifically, the time savings have been:

  • New client setup: Now takes 30 minutes. Was 4 hours
  • Server upgrades: Now takes 5 minutes. Was 1 hour

Cost savings

The original platform cost thousands of dollars for less than 20 customers to be deployed. The new environment now supports thousands of customers for less than the original spend.

Platform for growth

Lancom introduced Workbench to the opportunities that exist in the world of cloud computing, allowing them to scale from 100 clients, to 1,000 clients, whilst delivering savings and not compromising on scale, security, redundancy and recovery.

Services used

Software Development

  • Bespoke Development

  • Managed Services for Software

  • SaaS

App Modernisation

  • Refactor

Cloud Computing

  • Amazon Web Services

  • Cloud Managed Services

  • Cloud Migration

  • Cloud Optimisation

Managed Services

  • Virtual CIO

Amazon Web Services

  • CloudWatch Logs

  • Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)

  • Elastic Load Balancing

  • Relational Database Service (RDS)

  • Simple Storage Service (S3)

Ready to automate your business?

Whether you know exactly what you want, or have a problem you can’t quite solve, we’d love to talk about turning your good idea into great results.