www.outsystems.com

What can a mortgage analysis service, a private high school, and a biotech company possibly have in common?

3 Examples of Cloud Success

www.outsystems.com

>> Foreword

A lot of ink has been shed to educate companies about SaaS, IaaS, PaaS … and everything else that has to do with the Cloud.

But after you’ve downloaded and read all the eBooks, white papers and reports, there’s one element that is usually missing: real-life examples of how companies are effectively using the Cloud to fast forward their business.

The good thing about examples is that, even if they come from very different markets, industries, or type of organizations than your own, you’ll learn more from emulating success stories in your company than from trying to make any sense out of all those PDF documents.

In this eBook we look at 3 examples of companies who used the Cloud to avoid technical hurdles and deliver their innovative solutions fast and cost effectively.

So, what does a mortgage analysis service, a private high school, and a biotech company have in common?

Read on and find out…

www.outsystems.com

GreenBar America LLC is an early-stage company whose main mission is providing tools for self-administered personal finance decision making.

The mortgage industry has been decimated as a result of failing to ensure that borrowers are entering a transaction that is prudent, suitable and sustainable. And, traditional residential mortgage loans have been done using a model that looks “backwards” (to what a Borrower has done in the past) rather than “forward” (How strong is their current financial foundation and commitment to being financially responsible in the future).

So, in early 2011, GreenBar wanted to turn things around by providing a custom application that would support the use of a personal finance model as part of the underwriting criteria. This method would simultaneously evaluate multiple loan instruments to determine appropriateness and eliminate manipulation and bias (referred to as “predatory lending”).

Getting such an innovative application out the door created two potential dilemmas: If it had little traction in the market the operational costs would make the project unfeasible. Or conversely, if thousands of users started taking advantage of the application the infrastructure had to be ready to quickly scale to accommodate the growing load. In either scenario, time to market was a critical aspect.

#1 - Bringing innovative products to market

www.outsystems.com

Because of these two dilemmas, there was no time (nor money) to waste in setting up an on-premise infrastructure.

The best option to ensure the right mix of infrastructure and operational costs and flexibility to scale was to go for the Cloud.

In only 13 weeks, GreenBar America developed a consumer centric decision engine with a great UI that allows users to evaluate an unlimited number of mortgage products and thousands of variations.

To host this custom web application, an Amazon EC2 infrastructure was set up in a matter of hours, making the app immediately available to loan officers across the US.

The Cloud reduces the burden of having to decide on infrastructure needs up front. This is especially important when you’re launching an innovative service for which it is hard to estimate user adoption (and therefore the associated system load). • You can start with a small Cloud infrastructure to make your service immediately available to the

market, while also reducing risk and cost • As the user base changes, the Cloud gives you all the flexibility to grow (or shrink) your IT

infrastructure as needed • Huge upfront costs for infrastructure, software, and services are unnecessary, you can “pay as you

grow”

Cloud takeaway

www.outsystems.com

#2 - Replacing SaaS but keeping its benefits

Faith Academy was established in 1987 with a non-traditional approach for educating and teaching students. Today, Faith Academy has grown to 5 locations in the Atlanta, GA area that services up to 5,000 students a year.

While a combined on-campus and virtual approach to learning appeals to parents and students, it causes unique challenges when it comes to information technology. A key piece of the institution’s IT mix is a student information system (SIS) that combines student grades, transcripts and other background data into a single, streamlined solution.

Traditionally, K-12 schools meet this challenge using a SaaS software offering. However, back in the Spring of 2010, Faith Academy was struggling with growing SaaS package costs and increasing integration complexity necessary to meet changing business needs.

Dan Stueck, VP of IT, decided it was time for a new SIS application that could track and manage all information about courses, grades, transcripts, and students and streamline key processes like enrollment, grading, etc. – and eliminate the costs of their current SaaS solution.

The ultimate goal was to find a solution that would give Faith Academy the benefits of scalability and accessibility promised by SaaS packages, but with the flexibility found in custom applications.

www.outsystems.com

After trying out several options, Dan’s team decided to create a custom solution that would address their unique business needs and evolve as the market and business changed.

Faith’s team also realized that to support the full student body and historical records compliance requirements, they would need to leverage the cloud for their runtime infrastructure.

The result was a fully tailored Student Information System that offered all the required functionality to effectively manage Faith’s operations. The new application was delivered in 6 weeks, runs off Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure and has dramatically reduced cycle times allowing the schools staff and facility to focus more time on education.

Leveraging the flexibility of custom applications with the elasticity of the Cloud you will get the best of both worlds, just as if you had you own custom SaaS, but without the steep costs and limitations of SaaS packages:

• Applications run in a cloud environment, with no need for local operation teams to support and maintain physical infrastructure;

• Scalability can be accomplished by growing the cloud infrastructure, with minimal additional investment;

• Your application can evolve and grow, freeing you up from the limitations of packages.

Cloud takeaway

www.outsystems.com

#3 - Going with the best-known isn’t always best

Ortho Kinematics (OKI), is a medical technology company focused on providing spine surgeons with better information to enhance patient care and procedures. As with any rapidly growing business, OKI, faced a familiar problem – they needed to improve processes without incurring heavy costs or adding too much complexity to their operations.

To address their needs Adam Dietz, CEO of Ortho Kinematics, first looked to their existing CRM solution provider Salesforce.com® (and Force.com® in particular). The vendor’s sheer size and global market acceptance seemed enough to justify investing in that technology to solve OKI’s needs.

However, after months of development and $15,000 in services, it was obvious that Force.com was adding more overhead rather than solving OKI’s needs. Instead of trying to force an existing application like Salesforce.com to meet his unique requirements, Adam decided to cut his losses and explore alternatives for building a custom application.

He decided to move to the OutSystems Platform, which offered everything OKI needed to successfully create and deploy their ideal, customized solution. It was scalable enough to create an application of the right size while retaining the flexibility to add extra capabilities and components after project completion. Additionally, the platform was cloud ready which meant OKI would still reap all the benefits of a SaaS package.

www.outsystems.com

Cloud takeaway

Don’t be fooled by the apparent maturity of some PaaS offers based on the sheer size or market awareness of the vendor:

• Application development in the cloud is still maturing. In fact, some PaaS solutions were created as an evolution to existing SaaS offers. This makes them better for extending SaaS than for building standalone custom applications;

• PaaS solutions that rely on proprietary development languages and databases will lock you in from both a technical and services perspective. You’ll need highly skilled (and expensive) resources which may take your project costs through the roof;

And, with the OutSystems® Platform, their development team could provide candidate releases every 2 to 3 days. This allowed the product team to provide feedback on the project, and quickly steer it from a features and usability standpoint.

In just over two weeks, OKI had its dream application – a custom built solution that gives remote operators the ability to assign specific image analyses, automates workflow and gives department heads the ability to track each stage of the process. Based on this initial success, OKI decided to custom build a replacement for the whole CRM (salesforce.com) package.

The happy CEO: Now not only are the annual software expenses far less than what they were paying for alesforce.com but they have two

www.outsystems.com

>> What’s common in these 3 examples?

The Cloud eliminates the complexity associated with technical decisions, procurement and infrastructure set up when it comes to delivering new business applications. However, the challenge of creating and deploying those apps is not addressed by the Cloud itself, and this is where PaaS platforms come into play.

All 3 companies featured in this eBook have successfully used OutSystems® Platform to deliver their custom web applications.

The OutSystems Platform is a complete PaaS solution that is suited for creating custom enterprise web applications that are built to run in the cloud, and also on-premise.

With a 10.9x productivity increase, it just may be the missing ingredient in your cloud strategy.

Learn more at http://www.outsystems.com/cloud/

Try the OutSystems Platform in the cloud, for free!

Go to http://www.outsystems.com/download and get started in minutes.