DoiT’s John Purcell and INFINOX Global’s Danislav Penev talk to theCUBE at AWS re:Invent 2022

As the cloud matures, it is providing huge opportunities to innovate, but businesses hoping to capitalize on them face significant challenges. Many of them attended AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada, to discover how Amazon Web Services (AWS) can help them advance their potential through cloud computing.

In a fascinating interview with theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Savannah Peterson at re:Invent, DoiT Chief Product Officer John Purcell and INFINOX Global Head of Technology Production Danislav Penev discussed some of these challenges and opportunities and outlined how DoiT is helping the online broker focus on innovating and delivering value for its customers.

Managing complexity

The cloud presents huge opportunities for businesses to innovate if they know how to use it to abstract away the complexity of things like end-to-end data solutions. As John Purcell explained, DoiT clients are tech-savvy, and they want to find the best ways to use technology to take care of the more manual cloud operational work.

Danislav agreed. “You’re on the front line, you don’t want to get in the weeds on something that should be taken care of.” He outlined a typical DoiT client as being a company that understands their challenges and has reviewed where they need help. “You need to know your problems, what you want to achieve, where you want to end up, a road map for the next five years. That’s when you involve these guys to come and help you because they can’t just come with a magic wand to fix all your problems.”

Bridging the skills gap

The focus of AWS re:Invent is finding out what is coming next, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Adam Selipsky announces new solutions and enhancements rolling out to customers. This constant flow of releases highlights the pressure on developers to keep up with the latest advances, creating an ever-present skills gap in the cloud computing industry.

INFINOX is not immune to this skills shortage: “We’re tech savvy, but we have only so many resources,” Danislav pointed out. By partnering with DoiT, the company has essentially doubled its staff, enabling them to access expert senior solutions architects to help them design a new, better offering that makes them more competitive. “Essentially, we use the DoiT staff as an army of qualified people. We can actually cherry-pick who we want for a specific call. That’s how we fill our gap for technical skills and manage budget constraints within recruitment.”

John Purcell agreed. “It’s hard enough for companies like Infinox to hire staff who can help them build their business to deliver on their value proposition. Our reason for existence is to take care of the rest.”
DoiT helps to resolve issues related to FinOps, DevOps, DevSecOps or any of the classic operational problems that get in the way of a company’s core business mission. “You’re not in the business of running the cloud; you’re in the business of delivering customer value. We can help you manage your cloud.”

Danislav’s advice for clients is to gradually build a relationship with a cloud partner. INFINOX started working with DoiT on just one account in 2021 and built the relationship steadily over time. “Now, when we’ve got a new project, a problem statement, the first thing we do, we don’t Google it. We just say DoiT – log a ticket, we’ve got the team.”

Building for builders

As the conversation turned to the maturing of the cloud, John Purcell highlighted the role of innovation and technology development at the core of the AWS culture. “They’re building for builders.” But he also pointed out how the constant evolution of progressively more sophisticated technologies can put relentless pressure on the companies using them. “Across our customer base, companies that are scaling or at scale may be using a smaller set of AWS services, but they’re using them in interesting ways. And there is a very long tail of deeper, more sophisticated, more specific services. And Adam (Selipsky) announced maybe 20 or 30 services – and it’s happening year after year.”

A vital element of DoiT’s mission is to keep abreast of those developments as they emerge, so that companies like INFINOX can keep their focus on delivering for customers – without the added stress of maintaining an up-to-date knowledge of the increasingly nuanced and sophisticated cloud technology available. “When they have a question about, say, Amazon Sagemaker or the new big data service that Adam has announced, our job is to be able to answer that question quickly and accurately.”

Managing costs

Cloud cost management is a ten-year-old problem, and it’s as prevalent and relevant today as it was a decade ago. As John Purcell pointed out, “it is rarely cheaper to run your business from any of the public cloud providers. The key is to right-size it and make sure it’s operating in accordance and alignment with your business. It’s okay for cloud costs to go up – as long as your top line is going up proportionately.”

Danislav agreed. “We didn’t want to just save money; it’s about making money.” With DoiT’s support, his company has rolled out new applications for all its new product offerings hosted fully in AWS. “Now we have a better product that is tailored for our clients. It’s cost-effective and we’re actually making money.”

John Purcell highlighted the role of DoiT’s new product, Flexsave, in helping clients manage their cloud costs. “It essentially looks for automatic ways to save money by offering you opportunities to improve the economics of your cloud infrastructure.”

Danislav described the product’s user-friendly, interactive portal, which delivers analytics on things like cost anomalies, budget and cost of location in one place. “With Flexsave, it’s virtually like you just click your fingers and start saving money just like that.”

Solving customer problems

Wrapping up the interview, John Purcell underlined the importance of trust in DoiT’s business relationships. “If we’re not able to build trust with our clients, our business is dead. We work very hard to earn that trust, and we’re willing to start small to build that trust. One of the things we’re most proud of is how few customers leave us year over year.”

INFINOX remains one of those loyal customers. As Danislav puts it, “We don’t Google it, we DoiT.” John concluded by pointing to DoiT’s mission: “We exist as a company to help our customers get back to focus on why they started the company in the first place - which is innovating and delivering value to customers. And we’ll help you take care of the rest.”