Software Development Company Escaped Vendor Lock-in

High-level bullet points:

• Grew their business with scalable multi-cloud solution, load balancing, and automatic failover
• Avoided the slippery slope of hyperscaler lock-in
• Received exceptional support services

Founded in 2014, Lexul Field Service is a custom software development company that provides management and technicians with everything necessary for the job at hand, including documentation, history, time tracking, photos, scheduling, and customer details.

Executive Summary

Over the years, Lexul has developed numerous custom solutions for field service companies. With each solution created specifically for the needs of their customers, they noticed the gaps in the functionality of off-the-shelf software solutions for commercial and industrial trades. In 2022, Lexul began developing a new field service software called Lexul Field Service to fill those gaps. It serves as a solution for commercial and industrial field service companies across the nation to increase performance, drive efficiency, and ultimately help businesses get paid faster.

Challenges

Like many companies, Lexul started its cloud journey with one of the hyperscalers. As they began to build out their software, Lexul started looking deeper into the costs, and with growing hosting and infrastructure needs, costs were rising quickly. Lexul needed to balance operational expenses while also ensuring that the cloud structure and solutions were highly reliable and scalable, as their customers completely relied on their mobile and web apps to run smoothly. As they gained popularity, Lexul began to build out their product further and realized they were starting to run into vendor lock-in issues with various micro solutions. This issue pushed Lexul to start looking at alternative cloud providers that are proven to give customers high performance and reliability at a fair price without vendor lock-in. Shortly after their search began, Lexul found OVHcloud US.

Solutions Delivered

Lexul joined OVHcloud US and was immediately attracted to the option of having bare metal servers with a private network link to connect their bare metal to public cloud instances. This allowed Lexul to have intensive, predictable workflows on a more cost-effective infrastructure while still enjoying the scalability of the cloud. 

“The hyperscalers appeared to be acceptably priced on the surface,” said Lexul President Eric Ollis. “But by the time we started adding the network requests and data transfer costs, it quickly started to add up. As we were building into their platforms, we also realized that if we got too far in, we would never be able to leave the cloud provider. Once you start committing to their microservices and other solutions, before you know it, you have to stay with them for the life of your product because you will never want to go back and re-engineer your product to leave. We knew that our bill would quickly become thousands a month.” 

As Lexul began to grow, they became more interested in OVHcloud US’ multi-cloud solutions, and around that same time, they discovered the OVHcloud US Startup Program. Lexul was looking for specific technical guidance and assistance as their customer base was expanding quickly, their business was in high demand, and their solutions needed to scale up accordingly. The Startup Program cloud credits were another attractive perk for Lexul during this time, as they needed to update their infrastructure. 

“Having technical assistance for a platform-specific need is invaluable because those needs always come at a critical time. With the OVHcloud US Startup Program, it’s nice to know there is always someone there to help us. In prior situations, we would get to technical points where we were stuck in between the integration of our solution and the vendor, and during these specific instances, we couldn’t find the answer on Google and really needed a human to assist us,” continued Ollis.

Lexul initially relied on a few bare metal servers to support its solutions; however, it was looking to increase its reliability. The OVHcloud US Startup Program provided specific insights and opened their eyes to leveraging the cloud for load balancing and failovers for all components of their applications while still leveraging a handful of bare metal servers for the needed heavy computing. 

Results, ROI, and Future Plans

Today, Lexul uses a multi-cloud solution with load balancing and failovers in place. They are no longer dependent on a single data center in case of a disaster, which provides reliability and failover. The company is also using OVHcloud US solutions to better tailor and train its AI models for specific use cases and to protect customer data. In 2024 and beyond, Lexul plans to leverage OVHcloud US solutions to continue to integrate useful AI solutions into their applications for immeasurable productivity enhancement for everyday use. 

“We really appreciate the OVHcloud US vendor-agnostic approach across their solutions. Specifically, having Kubernetes as the main platform for us to build our solutions allows us to be portable to other providers. We aren’t going anywhere, but it is nice to know we are not locked into a cloud provider if, for some reason, we needed to leverage other solutions,” said Ollis. “As our business continues to grow, it’s great knowing that if tomorrow we doubled our customers, we could go in, click a few buttons, and everything would work smoothly. It’s a solution that works perfectly for our company.”