Want to run a successful digital agency in the cloud? CloudSigma has the right mix of flexibility and performance for you

Customer Profile

Based in Geneva, Swiss company Ideative, specializes in the management and development of e-business projects. Recently, the company, formerly known as Cobweb, teamed up with the Graf Miville agency to join the audiovisual and digital group Groupe Point Prod Actua as Ideative. Ideative offers digital expertise to institutions, brands, NGOs and companies. It offers analysis, consulting, strategy, UI/UX design and e-marketing services.

With a staff of just 25 people, the expertise and synergy of Ideative’s multi-talented team have attracted many clients who have entrusted the agency with their consultancy, design, and development of web projects. Ideative is the leading TYPO3 (Open Source CMS) integrator and PrestaShop (Open Source e-commerce) expert in Switzerland. In order to continue to provide innovative solutions to boost e-business development, the digital agency had to extend its application and provide additional hosting services.

In the wake of growing demand, Ideative acknowledged the many benefits of deploying resources with CloudSigma. It cited the flexible and easily manageable server configuration, which allows the company to present its clients with a whole new range of service opportunities.

“We wanted to be as flexible as possible in terms of adding compute and storage resources. On top of that we needed a Swiss solution, because some of our clients wanted their data to be in Switzerland. That’s why we chose CloudSigma.”Roberto Presedo, CTO @ Ideative

The Challenge

Ideative’s primary infrastructure was based on a hosting solution that was specifically developed for websites. However, the growing customer base meant that customer needs increased proportionally. Thus, Ideative had no other alternative than to look for a new partner in order to retain larger web clients.

“In our industry, when a client needs more resources, this must not impact the performance of the other clients. This was hard to implement on a physical hardware, so we decided to move to a cloud solution.”

Ideative’s CTO took charge of the crucial task of identifying the best cloud provider. The cloud provider had to satisfy all essential requirements of the digital agency and its customers. After a meticulous decision process and a careful evaluation of our platform during a proof-of-concept period, he was convinced of CloudSigma’s strong potential for a successful collaboration and future contribution to the strategic development of Ideative’s web services.

“We wanted to provide hosting services in order to have a total control on how the applications are working and the resources we must provide to the web applications.”

Roberto Presedo began his research by looking for reviews and feedback from cloud users online. Eventually, he came across very positive assessments of CloudSigma’s services in terms of performance and flexibility. Another key benefit for him was the extended choice of cloud locations. Apart from the Swiss cloud requirement, the digital agency was also concerned about the level of internationalization of the cloud provider, taking into account that Ideative also had to maintain services outside Switzerland.

“Finding a cloud solution in Switzerland is not easy, so our choice list was very short. After we read the comments on social media, we were pretty confident about the quality of your services.”

The Solution

Based on this research the Ideative team made a very confident and straightforward decision to migrate some of its paramount services to the cloud. Once they had their hands on the solution and tested its potential and usability, Ideative had no doubt it made the right choice.

“What is very, very good is the effortless way to test your solution. It’s quite easy to have a new account and very quick to build, install and test a machine. This made my decision to use CloudSigma very straightforward.”Roberto Presedo, CTO @ Ideative

The price of the cloud was one of the main concerns for the digital agency. Its customer base mainly consists of small-scale websites, which makes the company particularly price sensitive. Since there are numerous cheap hosting solutions for small websites on the market, Ideative had to find an affordable cloud provider.

“What I call flexibility is to be able to go to the platform and change the computing resources and the size of the disk in a minute. All that is very comfortable and well-executed at the price you offer.”

The Impact

In the past Ideative worked with another hosting provider in Geneva before moving to the cloud. Once Ideative became a client of CloudSigma there was a noticeable difference in the performance and speed of the services.

“On a scale of 1 to 100 points, I would give 90 for a price-performance ratio. It is a high-performance service at a good price.”

In order to upscale resources with its previous provider, Ideative had to sign a contract. According to the contract it had to wait up to four days for the provider to implement the changes. As soon as the digital agency started using the cloud, it found they could make adjustments within a couple of minutes via the WebApp. The talented team of Ideative noticed immediate increase in efficiency after the implementation of this new infrastructural solution.

“The moment we want new servers deployed at CloudSigma, we can have that in a very short time. I can delegate the configuration to any of my colleagues. The interface is pretty simple, easy, efficient and that’s clearly something that makes my life more comfortable.”Roberto Presedo, CTO @ Ideative

The Future

Robert Presedo is indisputably positive about the future of the partnership between Ideative and CloudSigma. He has given us some insights into the possibility of larger deployments to come. This is based on the expected growth in Ideative’s customer base. Current clients remain very satisfied with the service enhancement and flexibility gained through the platform. Increasing resources for specific needs and for a short period of time is exactly what most of Ideative’s e-commerce customers require for a profitable business and promising future.

“This is something that is very clear and valuable for our customers because they don’t want to have a big server all the time all the year. With that degree of flexibility and price-performance ratio, it’s easier also for us to grow and be successful.”