AFS Dealers

Cloud Management

Problem Rick Reeves has been helping used car dealerships offer better loan financing for more than 25 years with his application offerings. In 2017 he partnered up with a long time collaborator to start a new company, AFS Dealer Services. From the beginning, Rick knew that web hosting was an integral part of his business. […]

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Problem

Rick Reeves has been helping used car dealerships offer better loan financing for more than 25 years with his application offerings. In 2017 he partnered up with a long time collaborator to start a new company, AFS Dealer Services. From the beginning, Rick knew that web hosting was an integral part of his business.

As AFS grew they quickly required more space and reliability than their original Des Moines, Iowa hosting partner could provide. They decided to partner with a multibillion-dollar managed cloud computing company based out of San Antonio, Texas. Despite paying $25,000 per month for “White Glove” level service, the issues started to mount. 

For more than a year, AFS struggled with network blackouts and constant troubleshooting calls.

With the pressure mounting, Rick decided it was time for an outside opinion. He heard about Seven Hills Technology through a referral and reached out. Brad Gardner, one of the founding partners of Seven Hills recalled the first meeting.

“Network reliability was a constant issue which meant that continuity of service to our customers was at serious risk.”

Solution

Through the audit process, Seven Hills found a number of existing areas causing network instability and an overall lack of visibility into what was going on when a problem was occurring. Through careful gap analysis, planning, and implementation support, Seven Hills helped AFS create a more stable deployment to Microsoft Azure while reducing costs and significantly improving the stability of their systems.

Additionally, because Seven Hills has expertise in custom software development, they are able to provide a deeper level of support services, extending into development architecture and planning, as well as DevOps.

Results

  • A cost savings of $80,000 annually by removing unnecessary resources and optimizing the necessary ones.
  • A more stable network deployment resulting in less unexpected downtime.
  • 24/7 monitoring above and beyond what Microsoft Azure offers out of the box.
  • White glove service to support and maintain the deployed services to Microsoft Azure.

Technology

AFS runs on a low-code environment called Alpha. Alpha connects to a SQL Database for all of it’s data storage. Along with learning and troubleshooting Alpha, some of the Azure components we use are:

  • Azure Functions
  • Azure API Management
  • Azure App Services
  • IIS
  • MySQL
  • Microsoft Windows VM
  • SignalR