Cbus Super saves big by shifting from managed services to run services

When Cbus’s Senior Cloud Engineering Manager, Ajith John, took over management of the organisation’s AWS Cloud infrastructure, he felt the organisation wasn’t realising the full value of the cloud due to a traditional approach for using managed services.

Ajith began to worry that the traditional “contract and SLA-driven” managed services arrangement wouldn’t allow the organisation to realise the full value of the recent cloud implementation.  Yet, within a few months he found Shine could offer an alternative approach to uplift his organisation’s build and run capability for the AWS platform, and he soon realised more value than he ever expected.

Ajith explained his thoughts on the traditional managed services approach, “We didn’t have a sufficient level of control within our environment, and our own people weren’t really involved and engaged with the enhancement of our AWS capability.  We wanted to improve our skills gaps and capability, but we were quite dependent upon the MSP, which wasn’t the right path for Cbus.”  

“I felt that all of this could be improved by a better way of engaging with an external cloud partner with the skill and experience we were lacking, but I wasn’t sure what that would look like.”

A different vendor experience

Meanwhile, Ajith had engaged two of Shine’s engineers to address some challenges with running Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) on AWS Cloud. “We first engaged Shine to assist us with leveraging their open-sourced AEM OpenCloud for efficient automated scaling of our AEM platform. And the way they engaged with us, right from the start, was just more professional, faster, and more efficient than I’d ever experienced.”

“As they progressed with our AEM project, our teams were particularly impressed by the technical expertise of the Shine consultants and how closely they worked with us to share their knowledge.  Tech capability is one thing, but we found their values and culture aligned well with ours. Soon I began to sense that Shine had the potential to be a strategic partner.”

“We started a dialogue about taking on Shine’s Run Service, where they work side-by-side with our people and more proactively optimise our platform as part of regular maintenance and support.”

Proactive, agile Run Services

Shine’s Run Services evolve IT Operations with a customer-focused, engineering-led commitment to continuous improvement. Shine’s ethos is proactively optimising operational performance, focusing on prevention rather than a response to failures. A DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering approach embracing automation and early intervention.

“They have this triage process for support and enhancements, prioritising remedies and development efforts according to the net business impact. When we switched to Run Services with Shine, before long, they laid out how to prioritise the opportunities for improvement, and every month we see progress as they consistently make platform enhancements.”

“They’ve introduced more DevSecOps best practices so that we’re addressing security earlier. Also, we used to have outages related to the platform, and now we have no major outages on our AWS platform. The switch from the MSP to Shine was also entirely smooth without a hitch.”

Part of our team

“In contrast to some other providers under the Managed Services label, Shine greatly emphasises doing what’s right for us at Cbus – the cost, security, and long-term benefit. Nothing is half-baked, and they are genuinely part of our internal team rather than a separate one. Not once have I felt that Shine is a vendor – it always feels like I’m talking to a Cbus staff member who wants what’s best for my team and me.”

“They guided us to reorganise, so our cloud platform engineers are now embedded in each business unit development squad, being coached and supported by Shine’s senior consultants and backfilled by them when necessary. And they’re accelerating our engineers’ development with knowledge-sharing sessions daily. The team’s engagement has gone through the roof because they love working to the highest standards.”

Improved performance, lower costs

“With improved processes, we now have better capacity modelling and planning for what and how much can be delivered in each sprint, enhancing our ability to request funding accurately. We can more easily see what’s going on and deliver everything on time and within budget.”

“With our support metrics for our P1s and P2s, we’re seeing much faster turnaround times for resolution. In the AWS infrastructure area, we’ve seen significant cost savings. With the MSP, we had five full-time people from them and six in our internal team. Now we have three FTE from Shine and three internal. That’s almost halved the team, so we’ve lowered our internal costs. And we’ve also decreased our AWS infrastructure costs.”

“Having an ‘eyes on’ approach with Shine’s CTO, Luke Alexander, we have simplified the cloud environment to eliminate commercial licensing exposures and realised significant savings. With all our success, we’re now transferring our new skills and approaches to our internal Azure Cloud team.”

The standard for strategic vendor relationships

“Shine has generated great savings for us, and our infrastructure costs are going down, all while uplifting our internal capability. But possibly the most interesting benefit we’ve gained from a partnering relationship with Shine is setting a new standard for how our strategic vendor relationships must be.”

“The thoroughness of the engagement with Shine is what stands out most. Shine is now the gold standard for how we want to engage with strategic partners. They’ve set the bar for us, and they will be a key strategic partner for a very long time.”