Case Study

The Challenge

Fierce Software hosts monthly workshops as a critical component of its sales and marketing outreach efforts. These workshops use labs and demonstrations to showcase the company’s DevSecOps and Data Analytics practices, demonstrating its expertise in these two domains while providing complimentary training opportunities for customers and prospects. The DevSecOps workshop features the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform along with related open source technology solutions sold by Fierce which bring additional security, analytics, and functionality.

Fierce required its solutions to demonstrate exceptional performance and scalability during the workshops to create a positive impression and generate enthusiasm among both large and small audiences. Unfortunately, at recent workshops the company experienced challenges with both setup and performance that consumed valuable time and resources from the company’s Lead Solution Architect. As a result, the company needed an alternative solution that would enable it to minimize setup time and costs.

In addition, Fierce executives wanted to reduce monthly infrastructure costs over what it was spending with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and avoid usage spikes that occurred during workshops. It sought a cloud provider that would deliver a higher-touch experience and customer support across all of the company’s workloads.

The Solution

Fierce Software selected ORock to migrate its full suite of applications and workshop platform from AWS to the ORockCloud, an enterprise-grade open source cloud environment. ORockCloud is authorized by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) at the Moderate Impact Level and satisfies 325 security controls – an important consideration for Fierce due to the company’s extensive Federal customer base.

ORock’s team of U.S.-based engineers collaborated with Fierce solution architects to build, test and deploy an OpenShift cluster that could support workshops of any size by adding additional nodes to burst and handle larger audiences. Setup time was virtually eliminated by transferring responsibility for the management of the system to the ORock engineers. This approach achieved the company’s cost-savings objectives for both the infrastructure and Fierce personnel while avoiding an overprovisioning of resources.

As an added benefit of the ORock-Fierce Software relationship, the Fierce Software sales team now has access to ORock’s pre-sales engineering resources and a POC environment that can be used for qualified prospects that are evaluating the Fierce Secure Software Factory solution (which runs on the ORockCloud).

About Fierce Software

As a trusted IT solutions provider, Fierce Software delivers information technology and business process solutions to Federal and Commercial organizations. The company differentiates itself in part by only representing manufacturer partners with truly disruptive solutions that drive innovation forward while reducing cost. To deliver value to their customers, the Fierce Software team navigates the continuously changing technology ecosystem and develops solutions that meet each organization’s unique requirements.