Case Studies Vivint Solar Supports Entire Enterprise MicroStrategy Cloud Platform on AWS

Edit This Case Study Record

	Vivint Solar Supports Entire Enterprise MicroStrategy Cloud Platform on AWS

Vivint Solar Supports Entire Enterprise MicroStrategy Cloud Platform on AWS

Technology Category	Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries	Renewable Energy Utilities
Applicable Functions	Business Operation Sales & Marketing
Use Cases	Remote Asset Management
Services	Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services System Integration Data Science Services
Challenge	Started in 2011, Vivint Solar was a small start-up organization that needed a robust sales team to generate revenue and establish a strong customer base. They hired a team of analysts to support sales operations. These analysts, spread across the organization, relied on Excel to extract insights, wrangle data, and produce reports. This legacy solution worked well in Vivint’s early years when it had less data to handle. “As the company grew and our volume of customers grew, [this Excel-based solution] didn’t scale,” said Jed Rampton, Data Architect, Vivint Solar. Soon, their Excel sheets took hours to calculate and their teams spent more time debating whose numbers were correct than making a decision. Vivint needed a fast and flexible analytics platform that could scale with their rapidly growing business. Read More
About Customer	Vivint Solar is a leading solar company dedicated to improving how households create power. With 4,000+ energy experts in 21 states across the U.S., Vivint has served 106,000+ customers since its founding in 2011. Their award-winning customer service begins with a comprehensive solar panel consultation, customized solar design, services for processing all required paperwork, and quick installation. Read More
Solution	Vivint realized that MicroStrategy met their technical needs while also offering an intuitive interface that could be accessed anywhere (e.g. mobile, browser, desktop). At the same time, Vivint made an early decision to partner with Amazon for their data center needs instead of hosting an on-premise data center. With these requirements in mind, Vivint made a quick and confident decision to invest in the MicroStrategy Cloud Platform on AWS. “We were really excited, really thrilled to hear that MicroStrategy had built this tool to quickly deploy MicroStrategy instances in AWS and then, after they’re deployed, to manage those instances for us,” said Jed. Vivint’s small business intelligence team had a large sales team to support, so they didn’t have the bandwidth to manage their instances. MicroStrategy did that for them so users could focus on delivering insights to make intelligent decisions. The MicroStrategy Cloud Platform easily deployed into the customers’ existing Amazon VPC. This made security easy for their small team since they didn’t have to change any of their existing configurations. Then, Amazon CloudFormations deployed MicroStrategy on top of an EC2 instance, which automatically connected to a separate Amazon RDS to provide telemetry and data storage. In just a week, Vivint deployed a fully configured, multi-node environment through the MicroStrategy Cloud Platform. They also had a development instance connected to all their data sources so they could blend disparate sources into rich reports. Vivint can instantly scale these instances up or down based on peak business load times, saving them costs in Amazon infrastructure. Read More Log in to view content
Contents

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Renewable Energy

Utilities

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Remote Asset Management

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

System Integration

Data Science Services

Challenge

Started in 2011, Vivint Solar was a small start-up organization that needed a robust sales team to generate revenue and establish a strong customer base. They hired a team of analysts to support sales operations. These analysts, spread across the organization, relied on Excel to extract insights, wrangle data, and produce reports. This legacy solution worked well in Vivint’s early years when it had less data to handle. “As the company grew and our volume of customers grew, [this Excel-based solution] didn’t scale,” said Jed Rampton, Data Architect, Vivint Solar. Soon, their Excel sheets took hours to calculate and their teams spent more time debating whose numbers were correct than making a decision. Vivint needed a fast and flexible analytics platform that could scale with their rapidly growing business.

About Customer

Vivint Solar is a leading solar company dedicated to improving how households create power. With 4,000+ energy experts in 21 states across the U.S., Vivint has served 106,000+ customers since its founding in 2011. Their award-winning customer service begins with a comprehensive solar panel consultation, customized solar design, services for processing all required paperwork, and quick installation.

Solution

Vivint realized that MicroStrategy met their technical needs while also offering an intuitive interface that could be accessed anywhere (e.g. mobile, browser, desktop). At the same time, Vivint made an early decision to partner with Amazon for their data center needs instead of hosting an on-premise data center. With these requirements in mind, Vivint made a quick and confident decision to invest in the MicroStrategy Cloud Platform on AWS. “We were really excited, really thrilled to hear that MicroStrategy had built this tool to quickly deploy MicroStrategy instances in AWS and then, after they’re deployed, to manage those instances for us,” said Jed. Vivint’s small business intelligence team had a large sales team to support, so they didn’t have the bandwidth to manage their instances. MicroStrategy did that for them so users could focus on delivering insights to make intelligent decisions. The MicroStrategy Cloud Platform easily deployed into the customers’ existing Amazon VPC. This made security easy for their small team since they didn’t have to change any of their existing configurations. Then, Amazon CloudFormations deployed MicroStrategy on top of an EC2 instance, which automatically connected to a separate Amazon RDS to provide telemetry and data storage. In just a week, Vivint deployed a fully configured, multi-node environment through the MicroStrategy Cloud Platform. They also had a development instance connected to all their data sources so they could blend disparate sources into rich reports. Vivint can instantly scale these instances up or down based on peak business load times, saving them costs in Amazon infrastructure.

Impact #1	Users can access relevant insights from anywhere with mobile solutions.
Impact #2	MicroStrategy manages Vivint’s end-to-end data infrastructure needs.
Impact #3	Costs are saved by easily scaling instances up or down as needed.

Impact #1

Users can access relevant insights from anywhere with mobile solutions.

Impact #2

MicroStrategy manages Vivint’s end-to-end data infrastructure needs.

Impact #3

Costs are saved by easily scaling instances up or down as needed.

Benefit #1	Vivint has served 106,000+ customers since its founding in 2011.
Benefit #2	Vivint Solar has 4,000+ energy experts in 21 states across the U.S.

Benefit #1

Vivint has served 106,000+ customers since its founding in 2011.

Benefit #2

Vivint Solar has 4,000+ energy experts in 21 states across the U.S.

Download PDF Version

Overview

Vivint Solar Supports Entire Enterprise MicroStrategy Cloud Platform on AWS

Operational Impact

Quantitative Benefit