Client Success Story: Agima

Background

Last year marked AGIMA’s 10th anniversary. The company’s main line of work includes web development and integration, UX analysis and design, webdesign, online project support and development, digital marketing, SMM, and consulting.

As they explain it, AGIMA is a corporate-oriented web studio: it makes sites; assists, outlines, develops, and implements designs; launches projects; prepares analyses; etc.

Their core clientele is composed of banks and insurance companies, although they do sometimes work with major corporations and large portals. These projects often involve a lot of complex integrations with CRMs and other external services. The company is also involved in the design and implementation of corporate portals that allow employees to do most everything: get company news, plan their vacation time, and even attend trainings.

Task

The company started their search for a data center in Russia after the Russian law on personal data was passed (152-FZ). Whereas AGIMA had previously used services from providers abroad, their data now needed to be migrated to Russia.

The company also previously hadn’t enjoyed much flexibility; their developers would have to wait about one day for the provider to set up virtual machines and these had to be paid for a month in advance. In contrast, Selectel lets developers create their own test platforms and automate VM deployment, which takes a total of five minutes. They also use a pay-as-you-go billing scheme, which means companies are only billed for the actual time and resources used (if a machine is active for only 10 minutes, only that period has to be paid for).

Selectel’s Solution

In the end, the AGIMA decided on Selectel. This was based on several recommendations as well Selectel’s open API and exceptional reputation.

AGIMA rents dedicated servers for its clients (or if added reliability is required, two servers with one serving as a hot copy). For maximum hosting reliability, projects are migrated to the Virtual Private Cloud. The cloud is home to multiple projects, including the agima.ru corporate site.

The VPC is mainly used for load testing. For example, if a client asks what load his site can support, specialists from AGIMA will deploy the site to a test platform in the cloud and check the critical number of requests. The company remarked how convenient this is with the VPC; from a single button, user can allocate multiple resources, carry out their work, and then turn off the machine (without buying resources for the month).

AGIMA stores their backups on Cloud Storage.

For a pharmaceutical holding that launches various portals, they rent a dedicated server and DNS Hosting. One client wanted to be sure their project would be in tact “even if the data center burns down”, so the company ordered Selectel’s IP Failover service.

Another point AGIMA mentioned was that when the organization started to grow, Selectel immediately assigned them a personal manager, who regularly checks in with the company.

Results

Last year, AGIMA was named the number 1 web integrator and among the top three web studios by Tagline, the largest Russian-language analytics agency. Since 2006, the company has launched over 600 projects in the field of digital communications. Today, the AGIMA team consists of 100 people.

The studio’s clients include: Rossiyskaya Gazeta, World Class, Alfa Insurance, Eldorado, OBI, X5 Retail Group, Renaissance Credit, MegaFon, Samsung, Kommersant, Royal Canin, Rosbank, Raiffeisen Bank, Svyaznoy Bank, SOGAZ, Tinkoff Insurance, and many more.