Gnowit

What was the business problem?

Our product is essentially an information monitoring solution, so we need to be able to manage and sift through vast amounts of data sourced from the web.

What were the potential solutions?

To conduct ongoing product development and testing, we would need to either purchase a room full of servers, or use a commercial cloud offering. Both of these solutions would have cost money, and a startup like ours is very sensitive to incurring cost. The DAIR program was another option for us, but moving to cloud infrastructure is a big step and we were concerned about the risk.

What solution was chosen?

In the end we chose DAIR. DAIR enabled us to experiment with the cloud infrastructure for a fraction of the cost (and at a much lower risk profile) than if we had used one of the commercial offerings. We may never have had the incentive to consider a cloud-based solution without the DAIR program – which would have limited our growth significantly.

What was the result?

We had an excellent experience with the DAIR platform. As we move to the next phase of our business and prepare to enter the US market, we were looking for new resources to deal with the massive amount of information we will be processing – and to prepare we have expanded our usage of DAIR. We know we cannot operate our solution commercially on DAIR, but it has allowed us to perfect our technology and test it at scale – which gives us a huge amount of confidence as we move to
launching with a commercial cloud provider.

¹University of Manchester Business School/Rackforce Survey 2012. 1500 companies surveyed in the UK and US