CUSTOMER'S BUSINESS: SaaS

WHAT THEY DO: Inavero helps clients grow their business through regular Net Promoter based satisfaction surveys of their clients, employees and other important stakeholders.

IT GOALS: Scalability, Affordability, Expert Support

SOLUTION: A hybrid solution of Rackspace Cloud Servers, Managed Servers and Cloud Sites, all backed by Fanatical Support

BENEFITS: Inavero's critical applications work together seamlessly - as a solution - with the flexibility, scalability and reliability they require

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Company Overview

Inavero is a fast-growing company that helps business clients grow through regular Net Promoter based satisfaction surveys of their customers, employees and other important stakeholders. Inavero also provides consultation services to help clients successfully apply the results of their research.

Inavero’s online application consists of three main components: a survey distribution system, a survey collection and data management application and a results reporting dashboard.

The Challenge

Inavero’s business has grown rapidly, and so has the usage of its application. When a survey is sent, a huge peak in traffic follows shortly thereafter as users log in to fill out their surveys. Inavero needed its compute platform to scale with this demand, since the most important time to ensure the system is available is also when it is most vulnerable during these peak loads. Since Inavero is collecting data from clients’ most important customers, server failure was not an option.

“Scalability is key for our business,” explained Nathan Goff, Inavero Operations Director & Partner. “There’s nothing worse than making our clients look bad to their customers.”

The Solution

Hosting with a local ISP wasn’t working. The ISP’s 24x7 support was hard to access, the virtual environment costs were high, and system restarts were performed without notifying Inavero (which caused service interruptions). Three times their servers were taken down without notice. As a result, Inavero turned to Rackspace to host their entire critical compute infrastructure: development and test systems, marketing websites, and the core survey applications. They chose Rackspace because of scalability, price (less than other cloud providers and their ISP), 24x7x365 support with instant access via chat, and Rackspace’s culture of strong client service, which closely aligned with their own. Additionally, Rackspace Cloud Server technology “really wowed us,” Goff added. “I could go on and on.” He also appreciated Rackspace’s participation in NPS—which reflects Rackspace’s commitment to actively listening and responding to their customers.

“At Inavero, we specialize in measuring a firm's attention to client service—so I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly. Rackspace is definitely a good egg,” shared Goff.

Inavero has chosen a hybrid solution of Cloud Servers, Managed Servers and Cloud Sites:

• Cloud Servers: Inavero uses Cloud Servers to host their survey platform for surveys with a defined distribution. Cloud Servers can be added quickly when a new survey launches and sized to the needs of each survey. Cloud Servers also houses their internal survey management UI and external survey dashboard UI, as well as their development environment.
• Managed Servers: They use Managed Servers to house their main database and Sendmail server. “This is where the heavy disk I/O stuff is done,” Goff explained.
• Cloud Sites: They use many Cloud Sites for different purposes, including marketing sites, bug tracker and internal CRM (SugarCRM). In addition, for surveys where load or response rate is hard to predict, Inavero leverages the automatic scaling of Cloud Sites to adapt to the variable nature of their marketing site traffic.

 Long term, Inavero hopes to move more and more of their variable load applications to the Rackspace Cloud.

What's in the Future?

As Inavero grows, scalability will become even more important. Growth means more occasions when multiple survey campaigns are happening simultaneously, making those traffic spikes much more difficult to predict. Having the ability to quickly scale compute resources as traffic spikes will be the key to helping Inavero collect each response to every survey. Rackspace’s broad portfolio has allowed Inavero to match the right compute platform with the unique needs of each application. And as they grow, so will their compute needs.

RackConnect, which connects Dedicated and Cloud Servers at Rackspace, will provide additional ways for Inavero to leverage the Rackspace portfolio in a seamless way, as a solution, offering the scalability and flexibility that their growing business will continue to demand.