SoftwareOne case study
Why SoftwareOne fits the bill for Godo
The Icelandic hospitality software company is saving up to 10% of its AWS consumption costs by leveraging SoftwareOne’s (formerly Crayon) AWS Managed Billing.
Founded in Iceland in 2012, Godo is a leading hospitality software as a service (SaaS) company, serving more than 2,000 hotels and properties across 20 countries, along with hundreds of travel agencies.
Skúli Freyr Hinriksson is Chief Information Officer at Godo. “Our products cater to a wide range of hospitality business processes,” he says. “We have our Property Management System (PMS), a gift card application, an app to manage cleaning services, and a marketplace to seamlessly connect travel agencies and hotels, without a middleman bumping up the prices.”
In 2023, Godo’s hosting environment became more complicated when a large Icelandic software development company, Origo, sold its travel solutions into Godo. “We decided to neutralize some of this complexity by finding a partner to take over the billing for our cloud computing accounts.”
This could have been done by Origo’s technology partner, but the Godo CEO had been introduced to SoftwareOne and the many services it would be able to offer in addition to handling the billing for AWS.
“We opted for SoftwareOne as the more expert and wide-ranging partner which could help us in other areas, such as cloud infrastructure, engineering and DevOps services, if and when we needed them.”
Transferring the billing for Godo’s four AWS production accounts was no more complicated than SoftwareOne taking over the domain on Godo’s AWS Payer Account.
In this way, AWS recognized that the consumption was to go through SoftwareOne instead of directly to Godo. “And then AWS invoices SoftwareOne who invoices us,” says Hinriksson. “Of course, a discount has been agreed between SoftwareOne and AWS, and part of that discount is passed on to us.
“It is very hard to isolate the effect of this discount in the ever-changing pattern of our AWS consumption, but we believe this new arrangement is saving us between 5 and 10 percent – a significant outcome for a SaaS .”
- Client
- Godo
- Industry
- Hospitality
- Platform
- AWS Cloud
- Services
- Cloud Services
- Country
- Iceland
An additional benefit of the project is that the billing agent, SoftwareOne, carries out an AWS Well-Architected Review of every production account. The review is designed to align the AWS customer with architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. This is a far-reaching exercise which revolves around six pillars: operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.
“SoftwareOne delivered its final reports,” Hinriksson adds, “And although we haven’t looked at them in detail yet, we can see that the recommendations are quite extensive.
“The AWS Well-Architected initiative is helpful. It tells you clearly what you need to fix and in order of priority because the recommendations are listed in order of severity. We need to act on SoftwareOne’s findings because it’s going to improve the resiliency and the security of the system quite a bit.”
Hinriksson also sees the reviews as a path to additional savings. “One of the pillars is essentially a cost audit which identifies where you are over-utilizing resources. So you can create substantial savings from making what are often rather minor changes. SoftwareOne’s reviews will tell us where we can do this effectively.”
Godo is in initial discussions with SoftwareOne about a possible engagement to mediate the recommendations of its Well-Architected Review. “We haven’t even properly read the reviews yet, so it’s early days,” says Hinriksson, “but there is nothing in the way of us utilizing SoftwareOne’s help and resources. They were nothing but professional in the billing project – and we really liked the outcome.
“The communication and the cooperation with SoftwareOne have just been delightful, both with the Iceland team and the SoftwareOne technical experts in Ukraine. Very professional, all of them.
“Godo is a SaaS company, so we rely 100 percent on the performance, security, and resilience of everything we host with AWS to deliver world-beating solutions to our customers. With SoftwareOne we always feel we are in safe hands, and they are helping us massively to achieve our AWS objectives,” Hinriksson concludes.
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