Solar meets Cloud: Exactus Energy, a leader in professional solar energy services, leverages itopia, a leader in cloud computing efficiency
Exactus Energy is a professional services firm specializing in solar site surveys, engineering, and design. The company was founded in Toronto, Canada by Matthew Jaglowitz and Eddie Obeliunas, engineers wanting to harness the power of drone technology to provide accurate engineering solutions safely, and with rapid turnaround times. What started as a small grass-roots company has now grown to an experienced team of engineers, technicians, and client service professionals.
Challenge
Exactus Energy needed to deliver graphics-intensive CAD applications to its globally distributed engineers with low latency as they worked remotely amid the COVID-19 crisis. Their engineers cannot work productively without these CAD applications, and the CAD applications do not run effectively with latency issues. The large geographical distance separating the company’s multiple worldwide branches tends to offer a poor user experience, harming employee productivity.
The company had previously tried enabling their distributed workforce with an alternative VDI platform, but it was cost-prohibitive, too restrictive in terms of customization, and exhibiting performance issues.
Solution and Outcomes
Exactus Energy switched to itopia and gained the ability to scale its usage of computing resources from Google Cloud as needed, instead of overpaying their previous provider for resources that often went unused. And with itopia, Exactus Energy employees can access corporate apps and data from their own personal devices (a “BYOD” policy). This allows Exactus Energy to reduce hardware spending and bypass the cumbersome process of buying, provisioning, and shipping devices to globally distributed workers. And whereas the sheer distances between branches used to cause productivity-killing latency, Google Cloud offers the world’s largest and fastest network, enabling Exactus Energy to scale its distributed workforce by a factor of five. Finally, IT admins gained the ability to centrally manage this workforce through itopia’s unified, browser-based console.
“itopia definitely has improved our business. While Amazon WorkSpaces was an effective ‘Band-Aid’ solution when the pandemic first struck, it does tend to get a bit costly when you start scaling. It doesn’t offer itopia’s flexibility of being able to say ‘Hey, this user is not online at this time, so somebody else can use these computing resources’.”
