“Our cloud technology infrastructure not only improves our operational efficiency but increases our business velocity.” – Brian Rivel, CEO
Rivel Research has been conducting research in the investment community since 1991, when Art Rivel first pioneered the insight-rich IR Perception Study. Enlightened public companies today rely on studies performed by Rivel to understand how their corporate messaging is landing with investors.
In 2010, facing increased customer demand and a stockpile of research data, Rivel decided to address their ever-growing data needs. Fog City Code Works was hired to build out their data infrastructure and write custom software to automate their data management, report generation, and data collection process.
Build More in the Cloud for Less
The cost of purchasing and managing their own backend servers and software licenses, and providing appropriate bandwidth for their remote employees and contractors would have been in the 10’s of thousands of dollars and would have completely buried their small IT team in support, maintenance and security headaches. So, the first thing Fog City did was to set them up in the cloud. We spun up a virtual private cloud network and provisioned a server and a relational database on AWS for less than $100 per month and got Rivel up and running instantly with 99.95% guaranteed uptime.
“We constantly engaged end-users throughout the rollout to ensure adoption and confirm that we were consistently hitting the mark.”
Custom Software to Drive Operational Excellence
Using custom software developed by Fog City, Rivel automated many manual steps of their research process. They streamlined their operation to improve efficiency, reduce errors, improve research results and generate client deliverables faster. Fog City developed smart algorithms to analyze study sample and highlight optimal candidates. Business intelligence tools were developed to uncover bottlenecks and track productivity. Dave Weisberg, Founder of Fog City Code Works noted, “After examining Rivel’s workflow and how they interact with data we introduced a custom set of applications that streamlined each business process. We did a phased rollout to minimize disruption and set up performance monitoring and metrics for continuous improvement.”
End users immediately embraced the new software as it automated previously tedious tasks and provided valuable business insight. “We constantly engaged end users throughout the rollout to ensure adoption and confirm that we were consistently hitting the mark,” says Weisberg.
Scale Up for Rapid Growth
As Rivel’s business grew and their data needs became more rigorous, they were able to quickly scale up their cloud services, upgrading servers with a few keystrokes. Fog City was able to stay ahead of their data needs by leveraging new AWS services like AWS Lambda and API Gateway to connect with external data sources. When Rivel’s studies were scaled by several orders of magnitude, Fog City integrated AWS Elasticache to improve data retrieval times from minutes to milliseconds. The flexibility of the cloud allowed quick experimentation and proof of concept development by temporarily provisioning services to evaluate different data architectures.
A Technology Base to Facilitate Growth
Brian Rivel, CEO of Rivel Research remarked “Thanks to Fog City Code Works, our business has been able to scale fivefold. Our cloud technology infrastructure not only improves our operational efficiency but increases our business velocity. With this platform in place, we’ve uncovered new and meaningful ways to improve business processes that we never could have imagined at the outset. Our tech investment is paying huge dividends.”
Today, Rivel’s AWS footprint includes over a dozen AWS services. And even with 50 employees using the platform daily, their spend is still less than $15 per employee per month. For this small business, adopting cloud services allowed unimpeded IT growth at extremely low infrastructure costs. Their research process has been fully automated by Fog City and their data repository is full of rich and valuable information that they use to enhance their client deliverables. Thanks to their partnership with Fog City and AWS, Rivel has achieved business agility. As their business grows, they can easily and inexpensively add new cloud services, develop new products and services and better serve their clients.
