Streamtime partnered with PolarSeven to enhance security, optimise performance, and address compliance issues – enabling their continued growth with an expanding customer base.

Support to expand

Streamtime is a multinational company that has successfully provided solutions for the creative industry since 2002. Founded in New Zealand, Streamtime expanded internationally in 2007, offering software that provides a comprehensive platform for creatives to track, schedule, manage, report, collaborate, quote, and invoice. Streamtime’s ability to customise its software to meet unique customer needs gives them a competitive edge in the market.

Initially, Streamtime supplied customers with an installed product. Over time, the company transformed itself into a software and services provider. It took Streamtime a few years to adapt its products to support medium and large businesses, and at that point, its growth rate accelerated. However, serving larger customers also brought increased complexity.

As Streamtime began acquiring larger customers, international and government security restrictions became increasingly important. Customers demanded specific security compliance standards. Often, IT departments rejected Streamtime’s software due to security concerns or non-compliance with their standards.

As a relatively small company without a dedicated systems engineer or DevOps technician, Streamtime needed a partner capable of focusing on architecting infrastructure and engineering the modernised systems necessary for their growth.

Streamtime needed software-specific solutions, including:

  • Continuous integration and continuous deployment automation
  • Containerisation of their production systems to allow for scalable capacity adjustments
  • Automation to scale capacity
  • Security enhancements, such as Infrastructure as Code, WAF implementation, and separate accounts strengthening their Amazon configuration

The PolarSeven Solution

Through a competitive tender process, PolarSeven submitted a proposal that addressed Streamtime’s immediate challenges and provided forward-thinking solutions aligned with Streamtime’s strategic vision.

It was clear that PolarSeven could resolve Streamtime’s immediate issues and implement infrastructure to support their ongoing business expansion. The partnership commenced with this shared understanding of the company’s strategic vision.

As the project progressed, things evolved rapidly. The PolarSeven team made themselves readily available for frequent meetings, including weekends, when necessary, to ensure the project remained on track. This level of support empowered the Streamtime team to complete the upgrade within the agreed timeframes.

Radical improvements to Streamtime’s IT operations were made, including:

Previously, Streamtime’s local environment was containerised, but their production account wasn’t. This situation created a disconnect between the two, meaning their development didn’t match the real world, leading to risk. Now, when Streamtime is releasing, everything is containerised, and they don’t have to worry about production. They can write code and test everything perfectly, locally, and in their development environment. Streamtime now has a testing site, and when they release, there’s confidence that everything will be exactly the same at every step.

“(PolarSeven’s proposal) didn’t just answer the problems that we were asking. It said, this is what you should be doing, and by doing that, it will answer those problems that you’ve got at the same time. It expanded benefits way more than what I asked for, thought of, or knew was possible.” – Alan Whitby, Head of Technology – Streamtime

A flexible partnership for a dynamic project

Streamtime has removed the need for deployments. Whenever they commit something locally, it automatically goes to all their dev and demo systems, saving them time and effort and removing the need to patch the systems constantly. Their production can also be fully managed through the Amazon web interface, generating further efficiency.

Previously, the load on Streamtime servers sat at around 50% – once they completed the first stage of the PolarSeven project, it dropped to 40%, then 30% with the next phase, and now they’re sitting at just 15% usage of production resources. This means that their capacity to grow is massive. Streamtime also moved from older generation servers and databases to the latest AWS infrastructure, giving them feature and performance improvements.

“What PolarSeven has set up is that each service has resources across all five servers. So, if one of them isn’t using the resources, the other can utilise it. That meant that we were able to reduce the amount of resources that we were allocating to the service whilst increasing the amount of resources that one part of that could use at a time. That’s how we got the cost saving by having fewer resources, but each thing had access to more resources, which was faster.” – Alan Whitby, Head of Technology – Streamtime

The project delivered and achieved:

  • Highly available self-healing serverless container platform
  • AWS Control Tower and Landing Zone
  • Auto Scaling abilities
  • Efficient build and deployment processes
  • Upgrades of PHP and MySQL
  • Fully automated Node frontends build and deploy pipelines, including cache invalidation
  • SNS email notifications for infrastructure or database errors

Future growth is assured

This project delivered significant business outcomes for Streamtime. The company can now focus on serving larger and more complex businesses confidently, knowing the necessary security compliance measures are in place. Streamtime can efficiently optimise their AWS spending and scale their business with modern infrastructure supporting their growth.

  • 50% LOWER INFRASTRUCTURE SPEND Compared to legacy infrastructure costs
  • 30% AWS COST REDUCTION Due to more efficient server load distribution
  • 80% PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT From containerisation, ALB & CloudFront, + upgraded operating systems