AD VALOREM ADVISORS
Embracing AWS for Automation & Growth
AVA’s success has been based not only on the firm’s deep expertise, but also on the proprietary data aggregation and analysis that drives insights they can deliver to their customers. AVA originally built their data insight system as an on-premise desktop application – a successful endeavor, but one with availability limitations and a significant amount of required manual support. They saw a huge opportunity in rebuilding the system as a self-service, fully cloud-based web application but did not have – nor did they want to build – the technical team to make that happen.
AVA was looking for a partner that could thoughtfully design and develop a cloud-first system that was resilient, agile, and cost-effective. They also wanted to mitigate risk through built-in disaster recovery, knowledge redundancy, breach defense, and open source technology. Their end goal was simple: a smart system that was simpler to provide and maintain, so they could expand their business into more markets and for more customers.
Incremental Improvement on AVA’s Timeline
It was SevenPico’s deep cloud experience that first piqued interest, but it was the business model that sold AVA. The property tax firm wanted an option for incremental investment and changes that could be phased in over 12-18 months, which worked well with SevenPico’s “Software Development as a Service” model. AVA could benefit from technical depth, diversity and responsiveness that rivaled any large development firm in a platform that was created to start and scale at a pace that worked for them.
SevenPico developed a high-level road map that started with the implementation of a cloud-native backend that ingested data from their legacy application and presented it via an API for a newly designed web application. A third party design firm was pulled in to create the front end look as SevenPico implemented the underlying functionality.
"SevenPico’s cloud expertise is obvious, but their versatility in taking on large development projects on our timeline, and keeping our technology on track in between, is what made them the perfect partner for AVA."
Forward Momentum
The initial SevenPico implementation is live and being well received by AVA customers. AVA itself is breathing a sigh of relief knowing that as a cloud-native application, the system is highly fault tolerant and scalable. SevenPico’s AWS expertise enabled the firm to take advantage of several cost-effective AWS managed services including DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda, StepFunctions, EventBridge, Amplify and Cognito.
Because the project was deployed as part of a “Software Development as a Service” model, AVA is now benefiting from SevenPico’s ongoing cloud operations services, which include system updates, monitoring, metrics tracking, and incident reporting and resolution. Together AVA and SevenPico have also already enumerated three additional feature development projects to be slotted into an ongoing development plan on a timeline that works for AVA.
Background
Ad Valorem Advisors (AVA) is a full-service advisory firm with a 25 year history of reducing property taxes for their clients. Offering both consulting and management services, AVA helps balance the time and effort spent on property tax preparation, protesting and compliance while increasing corporate profitability. This business model has helped the company grow into one of the most well-respected property tax consulting firms in Texas.