Before founding high-performance managed cloud services provider Enki, Dave Durkee and Eric Novikoff were CIO and director of engineering at NetSuite (News - Alert). So they thought it only logical to build their new venture based on technology from a company with which they were intimately familiar. But, ultimately, the men abandoned the NetSuite solution after finding it too cumbersome and expensive to work with. Instead, Enki adopted a business process management solution from Agiloft.
Enki acts as the IT department for the cloud deployments of its clients, which are companies that make their money through an internet presence. Enki ensures that these clients’ systems remain up and running at all times. While Amazon puts responsibility for managing IT in users’ hands, Novikoff said, Enki provides a hand with cloud services. And it tends to focus on security-related applications for companies in the financial and medical verticals.
A big part of Enki’s business is service, which involves being able to respond to customers at all hours and quickly, said Novikoff. That, he added, is why Enki was drawn to Agiloft. The Agiloft technology and its service are responsive to Enki’s needs, he explained, so when the company runs into problems, Agiloft quickly provides patches and provides a fix within a release cycle or sooner.
Agiloft offers out-of-the-box applications, but Enki uses Agiloft apps as prototypes for marketing automation, sales automation, and support automation. Without the Agiloft toolkits, it would’ve been much more difficult and time consuming for Enki to build its applications, said Novikoff.
And while NetSuite’s solution is more customizable than Agiloft, doing the customization on NetSuite is much more painful, added Novikoff. He said that it would’ve taken a Herculean effort to meet full compliance using the NetSuite solution. With Agiloft's code-free agile platform, it took just two weeks to reproduce all the customizations Enki had labored over for years in NetSuite.
PCI (News - Alert) is the first app Enki is building, to control processes and automatically document them for customers. The Agiloft solution steps Enki’s client through PCI requirements, segregates those requirements so everyone knows who’s responsible for what, and automates a lot of that collection. The compliance app went live July 31, but Enki is still working on HIPPA and SOX compliance.
Novikoff said he couldn’t image doing it in NetSuite, which he said would have involved hundred of thousands of lines of JavaScript code and debugging that would’ve been a nightmare. With NetSuite, achieving all of this would’ve required the work of two to three people for three for our months, said Novikoff. But using Agiloft, he said, he was able to do most of the work himself and much more easily.
Enki owns licenses, but most of the activity takes place at its clients’ instead of within its own business. Customers of Enki can log into the Agiloft portal to see how they are meeting compliance, so they can easily gather information, if needed, for auditors. One of Enki’s largest clients had a PCI audit for which it logged in to access data toward end of July, and it blown away with the access it granted to everything the client needed to do the audit. However, it did ask for the ability to enable engineers to submit compliance documents to their compliance records, and Enki was able to allow for that within an hour and then use the next hour to show the client how it works.
“The ease and speed of configuration lets you prototype, or turn your business obstacles into business advantages, rather than struggling with a lot of IT,” said Novikoff.
Edited by Alicia Young
