DigitalOcean helps Zuar gain a competitive advantage with consistent pricing

More data is being generated daily than ever before, but leveraging that data to make business decisions can be time-consuming and difficult. Zuar is a business intelligence platform which gives businesses the tools they need to help them unlock critical insights through data, enabling them to solve problems, understand their customers better, and gain a competitive advantage. After experiencing rapid growth, Zuar had a need for scalable and predictable pricing from their cloud provider. Zuar switched to DigitalOcean and has been impressed by the pricing transparency, support, and ease of use provided to them through DigitalOcean.

“The level of free support that we get from DigitalOcean is equivalent to really expensive paid support offered by others in the same space.”

- Matthew Laue, CTO, Zuar

Problem

Zuar provides an all-in-one business intelligence (BI) solution to their customers that runs on a cloud platform. The Zuar business model is based on subscriptions and not usage, meaning their customers pay a subscription fee to get access to an environment where they can run Zuar’s BI solution. One of the key factors Zuar competes on scalability, and it’s critical for the team to be able to predict their costs of goods sold (COGS) so that they can plan their budget accurately and offer competitive prices to their customers. Because of its subscription based pricing, Zuar needs a cloud solution with predictable pricing to ensure its own costs do not go up unexpectedly.

Zuar had experience with a large cloud provider, and found it difficult to estimate monthly costs to run their BI solution. Zuar needed to be able to forecast its budget better in order to keep their COGS low, and started looking for alternative cloud providers.

“With DigitalOcean, it is not just that it’s the cheapest, the pricing is predictable!”

- Matthew Laue, CTO, Zuar

Solution

Looking for a more transparent and predictable pricing model to support their own business needs and costs, Zuar decided to make the move to another cloud provider. Zuar found that not only were DigitalOcean Droplets cheaper than competing products from other cloud providers, but that DigitalOcean had a similar set of functionalities and a much better price to performance ratio compared to other cloud providers. Zuar decided to do a Proof Of Concept test on DigitalOcean to test if the platform had the performance and feature set Zuar needed for their BI solution. With a few adjustments, Zuar was able to spin up Droplets on DigitalOcean for all of their new customers.

“The process of transitioning to DigitalOcean was as seamless as it possibly could be. After that, we moved all new instances of our hosted solution to DigitalOcean.”

- Matthew Laue, CTO, Zuar

Technical architecture

Zuar offers two different products:

1. Mitto, which allows you to connect, transform and automate the flow of all your data into a single destination for analytics.

2. Zuar Portal, which is a data visualization platform enabling you to view your data as readable reports and dashboards.

They both run on DigitalOcean Droplets. When a customer request is received, a terraform script is run to spin up Droplets for Mitto and/or Zuar Portals depending upon the customer’s needs and requirements. Each droplet is created inside of a VPC (Virtual Private cloud). In addition, a firewall is also provisioned. Having each customer reside inside of a VPC makes for a more secure environment. VPC provides complete isolation between customers. Each customer also gets a dedicated firewall.

,Business Impact

Zuar has empowered hundreds of small and medium businesses to answer questions related to their data, helping them to uncover insights that they previously had no visibility into. Zuar’s single tenant architecture, running on DigitalOcean Droplets, helps Zuar develop custom deployments for their customers much faster giving them an edge over their competitors. This architecture also helps them build industry specific solutions for Zuar customers that no other big company is able to provide. With better price predictability with DigitalOcean, Zuar is able to optimize their costs and stay competitive.

“I have used other cloud providers in the past but DigitalOcean is my cloud of choice moving forward. It has the performance and reliability that we need for growing our business.”

- Matthew Laue, CTO, Zuar