"Vultr has helped form the backbone of everything we do." - Rob Ormond, CTO

We recently sat down with Rob Ormond, Chief Technology Officer at simPRO, to hear how Vultr helps them keep trade professionals humming in the field. A field-service management technology provider with offices located throughout the world, simPRO was founded in Brisbane, Australia with the goal to provide end-to-end software solutions for small to medium sized businesses, primarily in the trades and services industry.

When the company began, they shipped an isolated system, a "black box", to every location and their software ran locally on site. In 2012, as they grappled with the challenges of managing and scaling their offering, they began to wonder if there was a new, better way.

simPRO looked to the cloud as the logical solution for continued growth and improved customer service. After exploring their options, and spending time between onsite and moving to the cloud with a competitor, simPRO experienced some reliability issues, causing them to seek an alternative. simPRO evaluated several providers and chose Vultr because it provides a robust cloud infrastructure that is available in the right locations, at the right price.

Seeking the Best of Both Worlds

For simPRO, it was critical that they work with a cloud provider that would allow their software to function much as it had previously, with a high quality of service and fast performance for end users.

Rob Ormond, simPRO's Chief Technology Officer, says that simPRO needs to run its software on a cloud platform that offers all of these features:

• A mature Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution with tried and tested products
• The ability to manage the operating system from the ground up
• Local data centers near their customer base, which spanned the world including Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and the United States.
• Varied configurations suited to the needs of their applications
• A price point that was competitive
• Customer service that was friendly, available, and knowledgeable

simPRO explored various cloud service providers, and did not immediately find one that met all their requirements. Hyperscale clouds from Big Tech were overpriced and overcomplicated. Other alternative cloud providers lacked the needed geographic footprint, or suffered from performance and stability issues.

Vultr Cloud Computing Exceeds Expectations

As the simPRO team continued to evaluate cloud service providers, eventually they found Vultr, the independent infrastructure cloud.

It turned out that Vultr's services exceeded the requirements simPRO was looking for. Vultr's Cloud Compute product provided multiple high performance, low-cost configurations, along with a 100% host node and network uptime guarantee. With Vultr's built-in SSD storage and attachable Block Storage, simPRO knew that Vultr could scale to store all of their customer data. And because Vultr was available in simPRO's key locations (most notably Australia), simPRO identified Vultr as the cloud that no other provider could compete with.

As simPRO began migrating their applications to Vultr, the transition was straightforward. Vultr's minimalist user interface and developer-friendly CLI allowed the simPRO team to spin up virtual instances quickly and easily.

simPRO's engineers could then configure all the virtual infrastructure and software atop it precisely as they needed – everything from the network connections and firewalls, to the host operating system, to the PHP backend.

Besides their core application servers, simPRO also runs more than 7,500 PostgreSQL databases on Vultr, spread across 25 database clusters, each with 3 instances, and holding roughly 7,500+ databases with over 4TB+ of data.

simPRO Counts on Vultr for Global Cloud Infrastructure

After going live with simPRO on Vultr, Rob and his engineering team concluded that they had in fact found the reliable, local cloud infrastructure provider that they had searched for.

"Vultr's price-performance is exceptional, and its highly-available infrastructure is located near our customers in Australia and around the world. We've got a great relationship with the Vultr team, and know we can count on them." - Rob Ormond, CTO

With Vultr as its infrastructure provider, the simPRO team is able to focus much more of their time and energy on feature development for their software.

Vultr is proud to have simPRO as a customer, and looks forward to working with Rob and the simPRO team for years to come.

Experience the difference for yourself. Try Vultr for free.