Eplexity Boosts Revenue, CSAT Score with Platform Incorporating AWS Well-Architected Framework

Eplexity increased market credibility and revenue, boosted its customer satisfaction score to 93, and dropped customer remediation time from months to days by joining the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Partner Program. The cloud computing consulting firm performed 12 Well-Architected Reviews in the past year and created an in-house platform known as CXOS based on Well-Architected Reviews in order to better evaluate customers’ workloads and offer remediation on continually managing and improving their infrastructures. This enabled customers to eliminate risk, respond faster to changes, and improve the overall performance of their AWS workloads. As a result, Eplexity’s customers have seen better business outcomes and more efficient information technology spend.

Denver-based cloud consulting company Eplexity was built on AWS and wanted to deepen its relationship with AWS to improve its cloud computing services for small and midsize companies. The company joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) in 2018, and later that same year, it became a member of the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program so it could incorporate the Well-Architected Framework into its business practices. Eplexity then developed CXOS, a cloud operating system that uses Well-Architected design principles to enable rapid migration and adoption of AWS architectures for its customers.

As a member of the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, Eplexity has increased revenue for its professional and managed services, better aligned its teams to customers’ business objectives, and improved its ability to identify and remove high-risk issues for customers.

An integral part of Eplexity’s managed and professional services practice, the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program enabled Eplexity to market a third-party standard for designing, building, and operating cloud architectures. “Well-Architected was a natural fit for us,” says Shiley Johnson, Director of Operations at Eplexity, “because we were already building to those standards before we learned about them. It was a competency we felt was in our wheelhouse.” And by running its business and building solutions exclusively on AWS, Eplexity realized it would increase its market credibility and time-to-market efforts, offer a more robust suite of services and proof of concepts to customers, and create a more marketable range of products for its sales force. “It’s a mutual relationship where we can bring our service expertise and have it backed by a company that is seen as a global provider,” says Johnson. The company spent the second quarter of 2018 becoming an authorized member of the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, and in the past year, it has performed more than a dozen AWS Well-Architected Reviews.

Eplexity has standardized Well-Architected Reviews in its business with CXOS, which launched in June 2020. The speedy, easy-to-use interface enables Eplexity to seamlessly navigate the Well-Architected Framework, to which all the readouts and road maps the platform creates to improve workloads are tied. Eplexity also continuously manages customers’ solutions through the CXOS Mission Control and Cloud Command Center, which detect, identify, and map efforts for continual satisfaction of Well-Architected Framework standards. “By deploying an infrastructure through CXOS, we have our managed services tools embedded in these application patterns,” says Forrest Brink, a Solutions Architect at Eplexity. “Having those main services preinstalled and baked into the patterns helps us to more frequently and easily perform Well-Architected Reviews on a regular basis for our customers.”

Eplexity has increased revenue from its professional and managed services by offering remediation through statements of work geared toward improving workloads’ Well-Architected Framework standards. For example, several recent statements of work used Eplexity’s managed service blocks to continually address issues on a recurring monthly basis. The company has also increased its customer satisfaction (CSAT) score all the way to 93. “We take a lot of pride in that,” Johnson says.

Being in the AWS Well-Architected Partner Program enables Eplexity to quickly evaluate new AWS services—such as an update to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance family—to see how they might fit into customers’ environments. “If you don’t actively manage that, you’re going to fall out of touch with service opportunities,” says Johnson. To stay up to date, Eplexity provides monetary incentives to its architecture and engineering teams to identify updates or any new patterns that Eplexity can use to evolve or innovate on AWS. “There’s an underlying motive to be the first one, to see around corners,” says Todd Reese, Vice President of Sales for Eplexity.

By using Well-Architected Reviews, Eplexity can perform detailed reviews, implement best practices, and enable its customers to build high-quality solutions. As a result, its customers can eliminate risk, respond faster to changes, and improve overall performance of AWS workloads, thereby improving business outcomes and creating more efficient information technology spending. “With Well-Architected Reviews, we can map out the next 3–12 months for customers, and that gives them a clear budgeting line item,” says Brink.

Helping customers get up and running rapidly on AWS is one of Eplexity’s superpowers. Johnson notes how one business in particular had spent 4.5 months trying to optimize its AWS computing on its own. With a Well-Architected Review, Eplexity was able to pinpoint remediation needs for the customer within 6 days. “Remediating items from the Well-Architected Review with our CXOS platform reduces the time required by up to 50 percent, saving customers money and shaving time to production from months to days or weeks,” says Todd Cameron, Vice President of Marketing for Eplexity. “That means a faster time to market. It’s truly a win on all fronts: for the customer, for AWS, and for us.” Eplexity also helped one financial customer that wanted to quickly enable remote work for its staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We used CXOS and the Well-Architected Framework to create a landing zone and an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud [Amazon VPC] to run those Amazon WorkSpaces so that we could securely deploy to its remote workforce,” Brink explains.

Well-Architected Reviews have helped Eplexity address high-risk issues for its customers, which is critical for customer engagement because it enables the company to suggest remediation opportunities. “We start at a baseline target of remediating 25 percent of the high-risk issues in production workloads and then help define for the customer what that looks like. Oftentimes it’s a bigger chunk of work than the customer might have expected,” says Johnson. “This exercise plays a significant role in helping customers maintain a Well-Architected standard while also enabling our team to explore, with the customer, what it might look like to remediate an entire workload.”

By incorporating Well-Architected Reviews into its practices and through its CXOS offering, Eplexity is able to better align with the business objectives of its small and midsize customers, ultimately helping them improve business outcomes and lower costs. “There are a lot of benefits of being a Well-Architected Partner,” notes Reese. “Everything from being introduced to new customers to having the ability to display our AWS expertise. By training and keeping up to date on AWS services and best practices—all that knowledge benefits each of our product and service areas.”