A Refrigeration Management Software that grows in the cloud
How can retailers improve their refrigeration management software to reduce energy and maintenance costs, avoid service calls, reduce refrigerant leak rates, and more? Easy, with Axiom Cloud. And how a Cloud Software Provider like Axiom Cloud can improve and scale their service? Even easier, with Teracloud´s help.
Axiom Cloud is a seed-stage company that has been around in the grocery retail market for over two years. They are a software-based company that provides services to B2B and SaaS retail customers to improve their grocery refrigeration management software.
From the beginning, they were conceived as a cloud company taking advantage of the great benefits of the technology. In this interview, his CTO and Co-founder, Nikhil Saralkar, tell us about their journey and how Teracloud helped them improve their backend to scale their business. At first, their prototype “did what it needed to do”, Nikhil tells us, but they knew that the company was a growing business. So they needed to get it right to be able to scale and be competitive.
“Our initial taken served a different use case. It was much more of a traditional IoT. We were expecting a bunch of both cloud and edge-style operations. The truth is that it turned out we were really providing straight-up cloud-hosted software for customers. There was no edge component. So some of the things we were building were really irrelevant”, says Nickhil.
As they tackled this challenge, there were a number of things they needed to do and improved. For example, setting up the environments the way they should have been according to best practices, the software itself, and improving the Infrastructure as Code, among others.
Long story short, Axiom Cloud was using a third party to build a new content structure for them, but the output was not what they expected. In addition, they were struggling with DevOps in general… until Teracloud came into the scene through a referral from a senior cloud and software advisor.
What were your expectations when you first contacted Teracloud?
At this point, I had worked with a number of contractors, be it remote individuals, or agencies. Working with contractors is difficult. So, I tried to be open-minded because of the referral but I was thinking ´it is not going to surprise me, it's gonna be similar to other experiences, I will talk with someone who´s going to provide a sales pitch…`
At first, I spoke to Alejandro Pozzi - CEO and Co-founder of Teracloud - and I was surprised someone who was so high in the company talked to me, as well as I was impressed with his level of technical ability.
Another thing that surprised me was the personability of the Customer Success manager, Carolina, and the DevOps engineer, Leandro. Both were very accommodating and willing to work with us. They actually listened to what our problems were and came up with good solutions, as opposed to what we've experienced in the past. They tried to get the business and then implement whatever solution was available.
I was pleasantly surprised, so we moved on.
What can you say about your experience working with us?
We are happy with the work Teracloud is doing. They listen to us, they really hear what the problems are. The engineers come up with good solutions. I think they are technical, accessible, and very communicative over Slack. They are very flexible as a team. I definitely appreciate that.
What can you say about the technical solutions provided by Teracloud?
They proposed a new architecture for accessing our services, VPN strategies. Another big thing is that they've been refactoring our infrastructure's code. From the beginning, there was a lot of unnecessary code and services. We built our platform with the intention of doing it the right way but I think we overbuilt it. So, at first, we refactored it into a much cleaner Terraform and tried to eliminate all the things that were not necessary. They've been doing all kinds of work for us on the backend since.
Would you recommend Teracloud?
They are very good at functioning as an extension of our DevOps team. Based on my experience, if someone is looking to augment their team with really solid DevOps engineers and managers who listen to the customer and work within your sprint with you and your team…then yeah, I recommend it.
How do imagine your company and Cloud Computing five years from now?
The highest likelihood is that there's an acquisition for the company. I think that will be the main provider of this kind of service for grocery retail. And if we can break through to building heating and cooling, we can also provide some more services to a bigger market.
In general, judging by the last five years of development, there's gonna be incremental advances in technology everywhere. The stuff that we're using today is not gonna necessarily be in the same form. But I think the way people do business it's not gonna be so different from what we see today. Through cloud providers, offering up tools, using computer languages…for the most part, the world is going to be similar when it comes to mainstream stuff.
The big world card, I think, is what's gonna happen with Web3 and how that's going to change the landscape, but I see that in ten years.
The other thing I see is a massive computer operation of Internet-connected devices and how we manage operations and security. So, Teracloud will have plenty of business. =)
Anything you want to add?
I´d like to pass along customer feedback. I like working with Carolina and Leandro. I appreciate them as people who really care about their customers. Carolina definitely follows up on a lot of things and Leandro is a great engineer. I enjoy working with them. I hope they do very well, they're great assets to the team.
Great work guys! And thanks Nikhil for your time and for sharing your thoughts and experience with us!
Raúl Verde Paz Marketing Consultant Teracloud
