California-based Giumarra Companies is a produce marketing company, working year-round to ensure that tasty avocados, asparagus, and a full line of other fruit and vegetables reach consumers safely. Giumarra manages and markets the produce of growers domestically in the United States and abroad.
The Need for Innovation
Giumarra is all about supply chain management and mission-critical software. In this industry, an incorrect label printed by one of their packing sheds can lead to an order rejection. To optimise and improve the supply chain, Giumarra did as Californians always do: embrace technology by monitoring data and implementing bespoke web applications. However, Giumarra’s IT solution had become clunky, outdated, and unwieldy.
At every step along the supply chain, a server had to be locally installed to take advantage of Giumarra’s web applications (Microsoft database, web applications, and mobile applications). This required someone to travel on-site to install and update the servers manually, often with no knowledge of what equipment was available to them. Product catalogues shared between shippers and distributors had to be updated manually. Data was slow and technology was bulky, expensive, and not conducive to dynamic business.
Simply, Giumarra’s set up was too labour-intensive to install and maintain, and too cost-prohibitive to roll out to all but their largest growers.
Why Cloudsoft was the right partner for Giumarra
Cloudsoft focuses on automating the deployment and management of enterprise software. With a highly-experienced team, Cloudsoft was well positioned to address the intersection between emerging technology and the business need for robust solutions.
The solution? Move Giumarra to the cloud. A SaaS model would be far superior: with everything in the cloud, the only on-site installation is a working web browser and compatible handset devices. The burden of installation becomes a cloud application problem rather than needing feet on the ground.
Cloudsoft re-architected the Giumarra application for the cloud. A lift and shift of the existing application would not have taken advantage of the benefits of cloud performance. Cloudsoft redesigned the client as a set of web-apps, making it lightweight and able to talk to the rest of the application structure running in the cloud. This application infrastructure was blueprinted so that Cloudsoft AMP could look after it, providing the capability to deploy and manage it with scaling, healing, or even moving it to more advantageous target clouds.
Along with rearchitecting the original client-server application for the cloud and converting it to a SaaS model, it was rebranded as the AgriNow Service.
Martin Harris and Alasdair Hodge, core members of Cloudsoft’s talented engineering team, took advantage of Cloudsoft AMP to seamlessly deploy and manage the AgriNow Service on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). They used a classic Cloudsoft AMP blueprint comprising a load-balanced web app server cluster sitting in front of an open-source MySQL database cluster. This cluster is distributed over multiple servers, allowing for maximum compliance. Demand spikes are handled with additional front-end web servers to make sure there is no disruption to the supply chain.
Cloudsoft AMP makes Giumarra’s infrastructure even more agile and effortless. AMP codifies how applications should and must behave by implementing policies which can be run automatically. Any necessary interventions can be implemented by using policies to analyse system metrics.
Benefits of Cloudsoft AMP
By moving Giumarra to the cloud using Cloudsoft AMP, Giumarra’s new solution is agile, scalable, and autonomic. The deployment of data is simplified and scaling happens effortlessly with application workloads. Giumarra maintains control over its data despite any hybridity along the supply chain. This means no more manual updates and minimal labour.
With Cloudsoft, we have a partner who makes cloud technology work for our business. We are more agile and better integrated than before, which reduces our costs and accelerates our time to market,” says Jim Heil, Head of Quality Assurance at Giumarra. “This has been so successful that we are teaming up with Cloudsoft to launch AgriNow as a joint venture.
Giumarra’s IT system is flexible and competitive with the potential to grow as their business expands and scales with emerging markets. Giumarra is poised to take full advantage of the future developments in cloud and autonomic computing without a huge infrastructure overhaul. Most importantly, Giumarra’s supply chain is robust with mission-critical software that remains continuously available everywhere it is needed.
With Cloudsoft we have a partner who makes cloud technology work for our business. We are more agile and better integrated than before which reduces our costs and accelerates our time to market.
Jim Heil, Head of Quality Assurance at Giumarra