SolarWinds was the right choice for Corevist for the simple reason that they ‘get it.’ Not only did they have the right tools, knowledge, and expertise, but they listened. They evolved and grew with us. It’s rare to find partners and vendors in the market like SolarWinds.”
— Justin Diana, Vice President of Information Technology
About Corevist Inc.
Corevist is a provider of e-commerce solutions to B2B vendors worldwide. Engineered specifically for use with SAP® Commerce Cloud, Corevist portals improve the efficiency of back-end operations while supporting optimal customer experiences. Founded in 2007 by Dr. Sam Bayer, PhD, Adrian Zehnder, and Joe Pryor, the firm based in Raleigh, North Carolina, has a strong pedigree in developing sell-side B2B e-commerce solutions designed to support seamless integration with SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), a popular choice for manufacturers, distributors, and online retailers.
As a supplier to many of the world’s largest B2B entities, Corevist-powered e-commerce portals process over $1.5 billion in transactions annually for hundreds of manufacturers and 180,000 dealers and distributors in 14 nations. Due to its dominant status in the SAP ecosystem and a year-over-year growth rate of 30%, Corevist has made four appearances on the Inc. 500 list.
Challenge
Organizations in major industries rely upon Corevist to make order-taking, invoicing, data management, and payment processing secure and easy to track. Their worldwide customer base and custom environments present challenges unique to the “always-on” nature of global commerce.
“The SAP system landscape can exist anywhere in the world,” states Justin Diana, Corevist vice president of Information Technology. “Each client has their own SAP landscape, and it’s geographically dispersed from where their users are and from where our software is hosted.”
As the scope of Corevist’s services has expanded and client engagements have grown to encompass over 20 time zones, infrastructure health, performance, and customer experience issues have arisen.
“We have challenges with latency, availability, and integrity because SAP is not a system we control or maintain or are responsible for,” he comments. “But we need to—in real time—deliver the data available in that ERP system to each user. And we have to do it custom to each user per their contract, their pricing, and their rules, which also potentially affects the user experience because our platform can only be as performant as the global managed service provider landscape.”
When exploring the needs of each client seeking to improve their online retailing and customer management capabilities, Diana says Corevist’s sales and customer success teams start by analyzing the existing infrastructure.
“Every client is obviously interested in leveraging the investments they’ve already made in SAP. Building a custom platform would require reinventing all those business rules and logic. With our platform and domain experience, the biggest challenge is the deep integration.”
He adds making the case to businesses heavily vested in their B2B footprint has gained an unexpected tailwind from economic uncertainty and the still lingering COVID-19 global pandemic.
“Supply chain issues and global inflation have caused a strong uptick of interest in the market,” he explains. “One of the primary problems we solve is taking B2B orders and data and exposing it to those partners through the web.
“At the same time, customer interactions that were once routinely handled by telephone and email became complicated in a world with staffers no longer coming into the office,” Diana continues.
“That raised the question of ‘how do our clients keep transacting business normally?’” he says. “How do distributors get the pallets they need to ship? Because we utilize SAP as the master data, all the historical data is still there.”
This new reality made it all the more imperative for Corevist to ensure communications between their clients and their clients' customers were stable and easily trackable.
“Suddenly, we also had to be distributed,” he states. “We were prepared for COVID from that perspective because we knew SolarWinds was right there with us.”
Observability Solutions Evaluation
With over a decade under his belt at Corevist, Diana oversees all monitoring and management activities. However, as the software as a service (SaaS) vendor’s global customer base has grown, the need to gain visibility into the IT environments at play within each client has become an increasingly critical function of Diana’s IT team.
Responding to the industry buzz surrounding observability, Diana spearheaded an effort to short-list the most promising solutions to extend traditional monitoring to the next level of visibility.
“At first, it was primarily driven by our continued evolution of the stewardship that we had on behalf of our clients,” he remembers. “The security, the privacy, and the user experience are absolutely important to us.”
Top-of-mind objectives included maintaining the bond of trust earned through an unblemished track record of 99.99% uptime, an unyielding commitment to white glove technical support, and uncompromising transactional security and data privacy.
“We have an immaculate reputation for adhering to our service-level agreements (SLAs) and demonstrable expertise in data integrity and security,” Diana says. “However, as the market changed and needs change due to COVID and a heightened awareness of cybersecurity, what was good enough the day before was insufficient the next day.”
Immensely helpful for framing the analysis of Observability candidates was an ongoing drive to develop compliance frameworks specific to the Corevist portal.
“Our mission is to continually improve at what we do to be unique and different in how we service our clients,” Diana says. “Not only in the relationships we have with them but also in the tools and the infrastructure we put in place to service them so that we understand their needs. We expect observability to enhance that opportunity.”
A straightforward path for integration into a broad assortment of existing tools was equally prominent on Diana's checklist. On this point, Diana and his team had a strongly favorable impression of SolarWinds.
“When we previously implemented AppOpptics™ application performance management (APM) and Papertrail™, it was clear they weren’t two disparate systems,” he notes. “Performance issues seamlessly connected to logs.”
Another non-negotiable was a ubiquitous ability to monitor uptime throughout each customer installation and across all SAP Cloud Commerce modules interacting with the Corevist portal.
Of equal importance was the stature of vendors within the tech industry and history. Once again, customer reviews on comparison websites such as TrustRadius®, G2®, and Capterra® helped vault SolarWinds to the top choice.
“First and foremost, we needed someone who was known in the industry and had the track record for being the right tool for the job,” Diana says. “It was important to invest in the right partner. We had things that made us unique. We needed someone who could satisfy those needs and concerns.”
In dissecting claims made by observability vendors, Diana says the potential upside of observability as a construct became progressively more obvious. What had yet to come into focus was how to best harness this new capability as an integral aspect of their own internal goals of automating operations, gaining deeper insight into component relationships, and reducing remediation time to solve performance issues.
“Before implementing SolarWinds, it was a manual and home-grown management system,” he says. “Our IT group is very small. We invested a lot of time and energy in writing scripts and adapting third-party scripts for our own use. It was clear that SolarWinds® Observability would allow us to largely automate these processes and consolidate them into one central repository.”
After a thorough review of available solutions and the field of vendors, the decision was made to move forward with SolarWinds Observability, a SaaS-based solution designed for multi-cloud environments.
“Working with SolarWinds has been a breath of fresh air. Especially at a time when it’s harder for companies to provide good service because they’re stretched thin. Our whole team has loved working with SolarWinds.”
SolarWinds Observability Rollout and Appraisal
After selecting SolarWinds, Diana moved the initial analysis phase into actively preparing for the deployment.
“Our IT and DevOps teams broke SolarWinds Observability into its components so we could better plan how we would manage implementation for maximum benefit,” he states. “We started collecting log data in the repository and determined how it would be correlated to data in other screens.”
Diana adds the ability to define customized monitoring specifically configured to the Corevist instances within each customer deployment was a game-changer.
“SolarWinds Observability allows us to build the monitoring around whatever compartments we choose,” he says. “In our world, and fact, the basis for our success, is that the client is the center of our universe. With Observability, we can now look at clients as a standalone entity.”
With end-to-end observability in place within their own hybrid cloud infrastructure, Diana and his team have been pleased with the ability of SolarWinds Observability to provide seamless visibility into client environments.
“We’re built on top of a real-time integration, so without SAP, the portal doesn’t work,” Diana clarifies. “We couldn’t afford to be the kind of platform where the client needed to tell us when SAP went down. That’s why the SolarWinds solution just made sense.”
As the rollout progressed, the emphasis placed on having an observability solution able to play well with other tools and vendors began to pay dividends.
“It instantly became apparent that SolarWinds Observability offered deeper and more efficient integration than other solutions we considered and to a greater degree than we had anticipated,” he states. “Now, we can look at it all in the same pane of glass.”
“The whole introduction of SolarWinds Observability was a great experience, including meeting key people. We have weekly meetings with SolarWinds on what’s working and what’s not. The product is being enhanced as a result of it. We’ve become co-contributors and are helping future customers as well.”
Throughout the evaluation process and during the brief implementation period, Diana says the support and knowledge base resources available further solidified the choice of SolarWinds as a technology provider.
“Communication and interaction is the basis of our SolarWinds partnership,” he says. “They really helped our vision and strategy evolve along with the company. With SolarWinds Observability, we see an opportunity to be even more refined in what we do.”
As the new capabilities delivered by SolarWinds Observability continue to be assessed, the upside of further data management initiatives is being considered.
“There are multiple advantages of aggregating data gathered from our user base,” Diana surmises. “We’re excited about having that consolidation. Among my priorities internally is to support the aggressive growth goals. Better data management can support exponential growth without straining our resources.”
“One of our big goals was to have a single pane of glass in a correlated way. One of the big value-added benefits is the correlation of moment-in-time data. We can get to the issue faster. We can be more dependable for our customers and our clients. If a problem happens, we can prevent it from reoccurring.”
Product Mix
- SolarWinds Observability
- SolarWinds AppOptics
- SolarWinds Papertrail
Location: Raleigh, North Carolina
Year Founded: 2007
IT Environment: On-premises, hybrid cloud, SaaS instances in 10 countries
