Clearwater Analytics delivers innovation & growth by migrating to AWS

Hello, everyone. Can you guys hear me? Ok. Can you guys hear me? This is just a test. All right. Awesome. So by show of hands, how many of you have completed or in the process of or considering a migration to cloud project? Like the Clearwater Analytics is one of our customers who have successfully migrated hundreds of applications and databases in a matter of few months.

Today, we're going to share their experience as they went from an on premise environment to AWS cloud. My name is Umar Said I am a Senior Solutions Architect Manager at AWS and it's an honor and a pleasure to share the stage with Shilpa Dabke, Vice President of Global Platform Engineering at Clearwater Analytics, Shilpa first little introduction about yourself.

Absolutely. So I had the global platform engineering team at Clearwater Analytics and uh we had to migrate over almost 500 applications and over 200 databases to cloud to AWS cloud. And I'm super, super proud of our entire R&D organization to do this and 10 minutes. Uh sorry, 10 months. Uh I wish it was 10 minutes but it was 10 months. But uh if you consider all the prep work done prior to that the moving of the actual workloads it was done in 10 months. So super proud about that.

All right. So going over the agenda briefly, I will share with you who Clearwater Analytics are and then most of the conversation is going to be about their migration journey. How did they make decisions as to which workload to start organizationally? How do they rally the organization behind the cloud migration? What were some of the learnings and the benefits they realized after migrating to cloud and above all last but not the least their experience working with AWS accounting this Shilpa.

Please tell us a little about Clearwater Analytics.

Sure. So Clearwater Analytics is a global financial services technology company. So fintech, um what we do is uh it's a B2B organization. Our services are for other businesses, mostly asset managers, insurance companies, government banks, corporations, uh whoever has money to invest, right? And these are like trillion dollars worth of investments that we handle on a daily basis. $6.7 trillion worth of investments. Data that we process in a very timely manner with with 100% accuracy. Because if we make any mistake, our clients will make a wrong decision on their investment and that they can incur a lot of loss. So that can't be right. Like that is super, super important that we are accurate and we are timely and every single day we have to process because market changes, there are so many aspects of investment changes and their decisions are based on the reports that we give them on a daily basis. So with this whole single pane of data that we provide with all the GAAP principles and all the accounting principles that we take into consideration and the reporting aspects that is super helpful to our clients, what we provide. So that's what we do day in day out.

Thank you. Super exciting. Ok. My first question from an organizational perspective, what efforts went into and you guys decided to move to a crowd?

Yeah, so there are two specific aspects I would say that people should think about. One is mind shift, right? The way people were thinking about internally about how exactly what kind of tech solutions we are going to use or how are we going to architect our solution? How are we going to solve a problem and what are the uh you know, kind of options that are available to us to solve the problem? Ah that was super important. People had to kind of rethink. And the other thing is our developers did not have to think about money when we were on prem because it was capital expenditure that once we had spent it for three years, they didn't have to think about it. They would just plop on more and more solutions on to the same setup, but we had reached our limits, right? Our business was growing and our systems were not growing, our scale was not happening. So we had to move to that. But then people had to change their mind in thinking about capital expenditure capex versus operational expenditure, which is opex. So that was a big mind shift and it's a variable cost model, right? With cloud that you depending on your usage, the cost can go up so that mind shift had to be taken care of. And the other thing is organizational transformation. It's a big word, it's a big word and it's a big thing. So right from our senior leaders to our middle tiers of leadership to all our engineers, everybody had to be thinking about, ok, what are we going to cloud for? We had to be always make them uh you know, aware about where we are. Why are we doing it? How are we going to do that? And at the same time every month, every few weeks, we were talking to them, how are we achieving what we were talking about or what we talked about and what we are achieving now is completely different things. So we were absolutely tracking to what we said to what we did and that was super important because that kept all of us on the same page all the time.

Thank you. Next. From a business perspective. What were some of the motivators or drivers behind considering going to the cloud.

So uh before I tell you what they were, I'll tell you cost was not one of them. So just be careful about that. And we were very clear right up front that this is not about cost, this is about scalability, this is about business growing. You want to make sure that you are allowing your business to grow. Um and of course, we need it to be high available. So on prem we were almost single, you know, like single tenant sort of thing. So if something happened to the set up, we didn't have any backup. We had a few steps that we had taken that our data was back up or certain things were back up, but we couldn't just bring up our business immediately like we can do in the cloud. So that was super important with the business growth. How quickly we can go to the market was super important. So any MVPs we wanted to do any MVPs, we needed to do any proof of concept we needed to do that was super important for us to grow and that was possible in cloud and the last thing, but super important and we are working on it right now is we have a huge presence in North America, but we want to grow into EMEA and Asia Pacific, we have clients in these regions, but we have brought them into North America and now they're saying no, you need to come to EMEA and you need to come to Asia Pacific to make data sovereignty and you know, all those things taken care of and that's what we are working on right now. So that was all possible.

Fascinating. Thank you.

Thank you. So, one thing, Shilpa, I have worked with quite a few customers. They're excited about cloud, they get the economics, but then the decision comes. Where do you start with workload? Can you share your decision process on the journey?

Absolutely. So this is super important how you do this. So there are two aspects to think about. One is how complex it is, meaning your engineers are going to be little very often, you know, like can we do this? Can we not like we are a little unsure about? And the other thing is your senior leaders, what is impact? What is the ROI? Right? So both those aspects are super important. So what we did was we created this map that high complexity but high business impact, low complexity even though it's low impact, business impact, do it because it's low complexity and you get more engineers moving towards that. So we write, put that as ok, we need to show the high impact to senior leadership and with low complexity, we had engineers totally on board and the senior leaders saw the impact, then the engineers were on board. So we said, ok, let's do more of this. Even though it's low impact, we get more workloads into cloud. Then we went to the high complexity, but we had to go with high impact and then we think about, ok, if it's high complexity, but low impact, should we even do that? Right? So the fourth bucket was debatable, right? Like should we do this or not? So that's how we went about and very happy to say that in 10 months, exactly a month ago, we actually completed 100% of our migration. So do that.

Thank you so much.

Thank you. Ok, reflecting back on the past 10 months, the promise of the cloud, where have you seen success or value realized?

So, uh super proud about the fact that what we anticipated what we planned, we saw that working for us. So that was super important. Um we saw that our clients were starting to have the positive experience because um you know, once we started moving to cloud, they started seeing the latency reducing. Um you know, the the fast uh approach and fast sort of um uh you know, service levels and et cetera. So we started moving to our SLAs, started meeting, you know, in a high 90% which was not happening before. So that was pretty cool. Uh we saw that our elasticity. So the way our business is we have time of the day where our workload is very high, the processing is very high because of the markets, there are times of the month the month end and quarter end and year end, et cetera. So we started seeing that the elasticity we needed during those times, we started achieving that without even blinking, right? So that was super important. We kept up with the high 90% even during those times where the workload was so high. Uh so that was a big gain, uh the high availability. So we had a business risk if i mentioned the uh sort of a, you know, single setup. So if if anything went wrong, we were um you know, it was a big business risk in cloud. What we did was we architected with multi-zone, multi availability zone. So we already were spread out. So now if one availability zone went down, no issue because our applications were spread out. So the other availability zone was already working. We didn't even blink and things were just smoothly working. So that was a big risk mitigation for the business. Um so that was built in and we achieved that. And uh we have ventured into so many technologies like AI to talk about where um it was so easy to just figure out, you know, just kind of play around with AI so easily without incurring cost or without incurring a lot of time sink into it. It was just very easy. So senior leaders are super happy right now.

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Can you please share a little bit of your experience working with your AWS account team or AWS in general, for sure.

So I have been working with AWS since over eight years. So it's not just my current company experience, even the previous company experience, but that helped me big time because i knew that AWS is one vendor. You don't want to keep at an arm's length. You want to consider them as your extended team. I talk about my concerns, my doubts, uh my problems to my AWS account team right out and they have been more than my extended team where they have come up with multiple um you know, solutions uh totally working with us. And that has been super, super helpful. I can tell you that there is so much we achieved in such a short span of time. It wouldn't have been possible if AWS was not our extended team. So I would say use them as your extended team. Uh every time I brought up a doubt or a concern, they brought, you know, multiple tech experts and I kid you not, they have so many resources available to the clients. It's a matter of them knowing that you need that. And the moment we told them and say, oh here you go, you have these kind of teams and these are super smart subject matter experts who could solve our problems. So we totally took, you know, we leveraged that training was a big piece as i mentioned about mind shift, right. It was not going to happen overnight. People had to unlearn so many things that they were doing on prem that they had to kind of get trained on and we, um, totally leveraged AWS training for that. Um, and even for cost saving. So what happens is, as I said, cost saving was not one of the reason we moved to AWS. Right. So in the beginning, you will see that the cost goes up like pretty steep. But our account team totally worked with us thinking for us that how can we reduce the cost even though they are working for AWS and AWS guides them to do that like mind blowing, right? That yeah, to help them help our clients reduce the cost willingly. Absolutely. And things that we couldn't think of that their accounting team thought about this and think about these 10 things and reduce the cost. You could do this, you could do that and they worked with us to actually see that our cost went down. So super proud of that.

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Thank you. Thank you, Shilpa. Absolutely. It was pleasure. Thank you.