When it comes to optimizing cloud adoption strategies or modernizing legacy systems, Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP) revolutionizes cloud and code migration for resource-constrained businesses. At the vanguard of resolving recurrent cloud migration complexities for businesses with limited resources, GAP bridges knowledge “gaps” with comprehensive expertise in building infrastructures and migrating applications that seamlessly integrate with cloud platforms.
GAP is a women-owned and operated strategic technology solutions partner based in Austin, TX, that serves as a boutique consultancy by offering a variety of technology advisory services. One such solution — their Modernize for the Cloud service — aids teams in getting their application operational much faster than normal, given the GAP approach to infrastructure automation.
Recognizing the need for automation in an infrastructure as a code (IaC) scenario, GAP builds personalized modern data and analytics platforms for diverse client needs. And its experienced, certified consultants advise clients on the best cloud implementation methods using the latest technologies to move their on-prem legacy applications onto a modern technology stack.
“If you think cloud infrastructure is easy, you haven’t done it yet,” said GAP’s CIO Dave Moore. “Making decisions regarding components, such as databases and load balancers, needed for your application is one thing. Getting them all to work together in a highly performant, secure, reliable and well-architected manner is another. As experts who have built similar cloud-based applications many times before, we at GAP automated implementation for certain scenarios. We know if you’re building a highly scalable web app, or a modern data and analytics platform, and if done right — yours will look a lot like others.”
With its revolutionary IaC accelerators, GAP focuses on deploying cloud resources and adds glue to get them all working together. Using Terraform, the GAPBuilt Accelerators deploy the required cloud resources and products for AWS and Azure migrations. With this “secret sauce,” GAP offers a solution that gets a business up and running in as little as two hours. The solution truly expedites the tedious and time-consuming process for building highly scalable web applications and cloud-based data analytics platforms powered by Microsoft Azure and AWS, which provide critical business insights. This enables clients to quickly fulfill tasks without manual interventions and capitalize on market-leading technology features that deliver immediate business value.
As for the different scenarios for the accelerators, GAP has spent years refining two of them specifically. The first is a scalable web app, for those companies building RESTful web services in the cloud. GAP made decisions regarding service mesh components in AWS and Azure and tied them together, enabling customers to focus mostly on their application. It was the key to a recent success story for Revealix, a digital health startup. Doug Wilson, Revealix’s CTO, recently said, “There’s a big gap between knowing what you want to do and knowing specifically how best to do it. Seeing this infrastructure — this fault-tolerant, scalable, standards-based, best practice-based architecture — come into being in less than a week is a miracle. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
The other scenario is a modern data and analytics platform. The architecture to enable multiple data sources for ingestion, transformation and consumption by different roles (exec, data scientist, SQL developer, etc.) is consistent across industries. By using the GAPBuilt Accelerator, customers can have a full end-to-end implementation deployed in AWS or Azure and ready to accept data. Customers can then perform their own transformations on the data and create insightful dashboards with their tool of choice (Snowflake, PowerBI, Tableau, Quicksight, etc.). The time to value is shortened tremendously, as the infrastructure parts were handled for them.
Also, it’s important to mention that unlike businesses delivering piecemeal services, GAP provides full end-to-end support, from advisory and consultation, to delivery, implementation and maintenance. GAP Software and Data Engineering services teams comprise talented engineers and matched to clients based on a proven formula of success. GAP’s teams combine their familiarity with twelve-factor app methodology powered by Azure and AWS frameworks with a shift left and microservices model.
GAP also opts for agile development, QA, and security processes so clients always get the skills required to achieve their business requirements. Furthermore, GAP can add Azure experts to an existing team or create a fully functional group that includes a project manager, scrum master, engineers and QA experts.
Clients who reach out to GAP early in a migration receive a “2NABOX” (GAP shorthand for “two leaders in a box”) model inclusive of an account executive and delivery manager. Through interviews, conversations and collaborative engagements with stakeholders, these leaders determine unified goals aligned with their client’s company objectives, as well as their team’s skills from a business, departmental and organizational standpoint. In turn, their clients receive detailed and custom implementation plans, educational support backed by real-world project expertise, and technical recommendations that directly tie into their business objectives or return on investment to simplify decision-making.
But modernization implementation efforts don’t stop there. Recently, GAP announced its first acquisition with Mobilize.Net. Mobilize offers automated code modernizations tools, expert developers plus proven processes to deliver modernized applications on time, on budget at quality. GAP’s portfolio will now extend to legacy application migration to modern platforms.
A key motivator behind this acquisition is GAP’s powerful accelerator technology that boosts cloud migration to Microsoft Azure and Synapse. Through Mobilize, GAP will add more power to its Microsoft cloud migration solutions and enable very fast implementations. GAP intends to continue to provide automated capability to convert Microsoft and other client server systems like Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Winforms, VB.NET, Silverlight and Access to .NET, Java and native cloud.
GAP success with customers comes from its laser focus on learning with every client engagement, and then applying the learning to improve on the next engagement. Moving forward, GAP — along with its Mobilize resources — will continue to be the preeminent boutique Microsoft cloud solution provider.