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Bounce onto the Global stage

Bounce Inc. leaps onto the world stage

With highly successful seven locations across Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, Bounce Inc. has set its sights to enter new international markets to drive its global expansion.

Project Background

With highly successful seven locations across Queensland, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia, Bounce Inc. has set its sights to enter new international markets to drive its global expansion. However, with facilities opening up across the globe the Australian company soon found that providing and managing digital services for multiple sites across different time zones was not straightforward.

“We were looking at expanding internationally starting with Dubai, but it soon became apparent that we needed a global solution,” said Eddie Tucker, Head of IT, Bounce Inc. “The key questions for us was how do we provide services to countries in different time zones, and how do we get real-time visibility and reporting by region to enable us to make accurate growth forecasts.”

Solution

Bounce Inc. sprang into action to search for a global hosting solution and selected Amazon Web Services (AWS). The decision was based on AWS’s track record for reliability plus the flexibility AWS offered for Bounce Inc. to quickly and easily add websites for new Franchises as its global footprint expanded. Additionally, AWS’s global support significantly reduced the challenge of managing operations in different time zones.

“There are a number of U.S. companies that provide this, but not to the extent that AWS offers. We agreed that AWS was our platform of choice and proceeded to identify a cloud service partner. After interviewing three AWS partners, we felt that Arq Group was the most fitting and professional,” said Tucker.

An AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Arq Group’s solution was to standardise the key components required to support each of Bounce Inc.’s new franchises. Each franchise was then aligned to one of three global AWS regions in order to pinpoint the website and booking engine closest to their customers and staff. By isolating to three regions, the team ensured that the company could leverage existing components where required, but also minimise the change windows to support the offshore and onshore support and development teams.

The Outcome

The AWS cloud hosting solution was first rolled out to Bounce Inc.’s Hong Kong, United Arab Emirates, Portugal and Thailand partners in 2015. Tucker described the implementation as simple and “painless” taking just a couple of weeks. “Overall the implementation team was efficient and we got fantastic support. Good communications channels between both parties ensured that any issues that arose were resolved quickly.”

Scalability and flexibility were key features of the solution that Tucker and his team appreciated. “As our business grew, AWS had the capacity to meet our growing requirements. We were able to easily upgrade our web and database services within minutes to high levels of capacity without incurring huge costs. The flexibility to increase and grow our services to meet the demands of our business is incredible,” he said.

In addition, Arq Group created a standardised approach to how new sites are deployed, managed and fit within Bounce Inc.’s launch activities. There was a clear demarcation of responsibilities with Arq Group to offer support relating to code and content whenever it was required. “Service is managed by AWS and Arq Group so we do not need service specialists internally and it frees up my team for activities that add value to our business. This is important because we don’t have a large in-house IT team given that we are a young company,” Tucker said.

Being able to enhance customers’ experience was also a huge bonus. “Overseas investors who want to set up Bounce in their own market will find that our ‘all-in-one’ IT solution is fuss-free. They don’t have to worry about a thing, and neither do we because it’s a scalable solution that we can monitor,” he said.

With the support from Arq Group, Bounce Inc.’s international expansion plan is on track. The company added two brand new countries, Sweden and Singapore in 2016, plus a number of additional venues in existing markets, with more new locations in the pipeline for 2017.