nineMotion, a Bangalore-based online services marketplace, helps small businesses around the world outsource their requirements, monitor providers’ work, and help build a successful relationship between the two. The company recently decided to shift its framework to Amazon Web Services (AWS). The work typically outsourced, includes software development, website design, language translation, graphics and animation, engineering services and writing. Service providers from across the world register on nineMotion and set up profiles. Buyers who have a need, post their requirements on the website and get to choose from proposals submitted by nineMotion providers. According to nineMotion, its templates, processes and tools help businesses to engage meaningfully and build better relationships.

The Services Marketplace

Deepak Vinchhi, CEO, nineMotion Systems said, "nineMotion’s marketplace is different from other product marketplaces like eBay. Product marketplaces are transactional in nature. Typically, they are one-time transactions focused on finding the cheapest product. Services marketplaces are relationship-oriented. When you strike a deal it is only a promise to deliver; nothing’s been delivered yet. You then work on it to make it happen. Your changing requirements, assumptions about the provider and, above all, a continuous working relationship between the two is critical until the website is delivered. Many companies struggle with outsourcing services because they approach it like buying computers online. That’s where a relationship-based services marketplace helps. To make this work, technology plays a major role and we’re presently getting that in place."

Small Businesses Face Greater Challenges

According to Bala Girisaballa, co-founder and vice president, nineMotion Systems, "Small businesses face greater challenges in outsourcing their requirements. Compared to large businesses, small businesses can’t spend a lot of time and effort in selecting and building relationships with their providers. Outsourcing can help them to sustain their competitive edge. But, the traditional high-touch, high-cost outsourcing channel effectively keeps them from taking advantage of this trend. The Internet can help as an effective and efficient medium to outsource services. Services marketplaces such as nineMotion are uniquely built to connect, contract and control/collaborate to help usher in the second wave of outsourcing."

Remaining 'Always On'

For a global business like nineMotion, any downtime hurts not only website traffic but also its brand image. nineMotion’s users access the website from over 22 countries. Therefore, it needs to be available all the time. Secondly, as the website becomes popular, the technical infrastructure should be able to scale up to serve the increasing website traffic. Website availability and scalability are the two critical requirements for a satisfying user experience. Traditionally, this is handled using operations-heavy infrastructure, by monitoring the website constantly for availability as well as peak and average loads. Data replication, mirroring and backups are needed to ensure that the website survives server outages.

Advanced infrastructure planning becomes important due to lead times to implement them. If you expect your traffic to double in a month, you need to be prepared (often weeks in advance) to set up additional hardware and bandwidth. Moreover, adding new servers add to cost and most of the time there is a lot of unutilised space and computing power. nineMotion found this to be an inefficient method to run operations. Planning and monitoring infrastructure today is cumbersome for startups and takes away precious energy that could be better used to manage its growing business.

A Better Way

nineMotion was on the lookout for an infrastructure solution that can grow and scale seamlessly with its needs. The mandate was that it should be able to optimally suit any seasonal spurts, remain reliable, and grow when needed. Amazon Web Services proved to be an ideal solution.

According to nineMotion, Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the opportunity to replace existing infrastructure and scale up or down based on resource demands. This flexibility allows the business to be run at 'web-scale', uninhibited by growth in the number of geographic markets. It is observed that, on average, businesses spend 70 percent of their time building, maintaining and worrying about infrastructure, and 30 percent of their time focused on the ideas that will propel their business forward. Web-scale computing is helping to invert the 70:30 ratio, enabling you to spend your energy creating the difference that will make your business successful.

Employing a service from AWS called EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), websites such as nineMotion can do scalable deployment of applications. They are able to create, launch and terminate server instances on demand (hence ‘elastic’). The best part is that nineMotion now pays only for what it uses. It can get as many instances up any time and bring them down when needed. This allows the company to use computing as a utility and save costs, while ensuring scalability.

Similarly, another service called S3 (Simple Storage Service) allows nineMotion to use only as much storage space as it needs. S3 provides unlimited storage through a simple web services interface. Data can be easily stored and retrieved at any time, from anywhere on the web. Amazon charges proportionate to the amount of data stored and applies charges for sending and receiving data.
Future Scenario.

nineMotion is currently undergoing the process of migration from a set of server boxes hosted by an ISP to Amazon Web Services. At the end of its migration, nineMotion expects to reduce operations cost, as well as hosting cost by 60 percent. The icing on the cake is that these cost savings come with greater reliability, scalability and availability of the website.

"Increasingly, businesses today are forced to revisit conventional wisdom, that higher price means higher quality. We're a classic example of a company that’s reducing its operations cost, but providing higher quality of service to customers," concluded Bala.