Chrome River Saves Over $30,000 Per Month with AWS Marketplace

Chrome River's travel and expense management solutions automate and streamline accounts payable processes by enforcing compliance and delivering actionable insight. The company needed a single place to store and reference data from thousands of customers while removing the internal infrastructure associated with the data logging process. Since the company was already using Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company turned to AWS Marketplace. In AWS Marketplace, Chrome River found solutions for both its data storage and log management needs with Fivetran and Logz.io. The services have increased efficiency and eliminated manual data maintenance, saving the company $38,000 and 40 working hours per month.

Chrome River, part of Emburse, provides travel and expense management solutions to automate and streamline accounts payable processes by enforcing compliance and delivering data-driven insights. The company's apps are completely configurable, so organizations are afforded more choices for finance software, travel management companies, corporate card programs, and online booking tools. The data these organizations share with Chrome River is logged and analyzed by the company for actionable intelligence about spending trends. With thousands of customers constantly uploading transaction data, Chrome River needed a single place to store and reference all this data. Furthermore, the company needed to remove the internal infrastructure associated with the logging process so engineers could focus on other initiatives. Chrome River turned to AWS Marketplace. There, Chrome River found solutions from Fivetran and Logz.io to store data and manage logs more efficiently.

The biggest technical hurdle for Chrome River is the sheer amount of data the company ingests. With thousands of companies using its services, expense data is being captured for hundreds of thousands of employees all over the world. These transactions create a rich data lake, but without a way to store and analyze that data, Chrome River can't use it to help customers. Fivetran is an integrated system for cloud services, databases, and, business intelligence that extracts a company’s data from the cloud to its data warehouse. Fivetran’s simple setup process allowed Chrome River to start parsing through data in under ten minutes. The solution offers over 150 data connectors and zero-maintenance fully-managed pipelines. “We chose Fivetran for its flexible pricing and stress-free setup. Within minutes we were sending and consuming data efficiently and effectively with very little overhead,” recalls Devin Levy, vice president of operations at Emburse.

With Fivetran automating these insights, Chrome River could now turn its attention to the resource drain caused by having internal engineers maintain the company's data logs. Logz.io is an intelligent log analysis platform combining Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) as a cloud service, with machine learning to derive new insights from machine data. This solution allowed Chrome River to remove all internal logging infrastructure, freeing up engineers to deal with more important projects. According to Levy, "We're genuinely happy with Logz.io. Even if something came along that was better suited for us financially, or from an engineering perspective, I would evaluate it, but at this point, nothing has been comparable to Logz.io." With Logz.io now handling logging maintenance, the company saves roughly 30 to 40 working hours per month.

Implementing these solutions from AWS Marketplace has eliminated the maintenance of data pipelines and produced about $38,000 per month of net savings. Chrome River has benefitted from the robust solutions found in AWS Marketplace and from the flexibility that AWS Marketplace contracts offer. Levy says of AWS Marketplace experience, "What AWS Marketplace does, from my perspective, is give the purchaser some leverage and options when it comes to pricing terms. Instead of paying one upfront, yearly invoice, it affords an organization the opportunity to pay monthly, which helps preserve cash on top of the final negotiated price."