Grata Software integrated numerous websites and apps onto AWS and manages them. They oversee app development and have written scripts to optimize AWS.
Grata Software has significantly reduced site and app outages through preventative maintenance, going from about 20 hours a year to only two. They’re extremely responsive and maintain open communication. They do more than what’s paid for, making them a reliable and trustworthy partner.
Introduce your business and what you do there.
I’m the CEO of Six Seconds, a 501 c3 nonprofit focused on helping people practice emotional intelligence.
What challenge were you trying to address with Grata Software?
We have regular contractors and internal team members devoted to managing our web services and apps, but we didn’t have an actual IT team. We needed a partner to help improve the uptime and reliability of our products and services.
What was the scope of their involvement?
At a high level, Grata Software has helped put our various websites and apps into one place on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and also configures and manages them. They created a process for testing and deploying changes to sites while also maintaining and updating the servers on AWS. They provide architecture guidance for our web apps, letting our contracted developers know if they’ve missed something or need to fix a problem.
Our system uses Laravel, .NET, PHP, mySQL, and Microsoft SQL. Grata Software has written various scripts for AWS to help with things like load balancers, the deployment process, and backups.
What is the team composition?
We mainly work with the owner, but we have occasional interaction with other team members when he’s not available and we need something urgently.
How did you come to work with Grata Software?
The CTO of another business recommended Grata Software and said they could solve our problem, so we hired them.
How much have you invested with them?
We’ve spent between $50,000–$100,000.
What is the status of this engagement?
We partnered in March 2016, and the work is ongoing.
What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?
Our website and important apps were having fairly frequent outages before we hired Grata Software. It used to be around 18–20 hours of downtime a year, but now we’ve only had a couple in the past year. Using preventative maintenance they’ve hugely reduced the complexity of solving our problems, which makes my job much less stressful.
How did Grata Software perform from a project management standpoint?
Our method of communication changes depending on the project. We’ve used Jira in the past, which they helped us configure.
What did you find most impressive about them?
As a nonprofit, we don’t have extensive funds, but Grata Software has worked hard to provide services we probably couldn’t afford otherwise. They’re incredibly dedicated to our project, sending emails even as early as 1 a.m. their time. We get a lot more attention than what we’re paying for.
Are there any areas they could improve?
It would be nice to have more available team members to work with, but that’s mainly due to cost restrictions on our side.
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