MicroStar Case Study

Project: Next Generation Cloud Managed Services

Company: MicroStar

Industry: Manufacturing

About MicroStar

MicroStar® is the leading provider of diversified keg solutions to the American beer industry. Microstar’s Keg Management & Quality Services divisions deliver efficient and cost-effective Kegs as a Service supporting some of the largest keg fleets in the world. Microstar is headquartered in Denver, Colorado with sophisticated maintenance and processing facilities in Ft. Collins, CO, Green Bay, WI, and Eagle Pass, TX.

Challenges

Microstar has experienced extraordinary growth in recent years as craft beer has exploded across America. Growing revenue and headcount by more than 10X while adding significant capacity across various locations. IT Systems & Core Applications became high priority as they were not scaling to meet the needs of the much larger and rapidly growing business.

Challenge 1

Rapid growth shocked the IT infrastructure.

Challenge 2

IT systems were not scaling to keep up with growth.

Challenge 3

MicroStar wanted to scale efficiently and continue to grow business.

Solutions

EPLEXITY began working with Microstar in early 2017, providing AWS InfoSec consulting. This quickly led to a more strategic engagement where Eplexity was hired to complete the enhancement and refactoring of their core ERP application, TAP2. Working with their internal Web Dev team, we supported new feature development and redesign while architecting and leading their cloud native refactoring effort from ASP/VBScript to cloud native services on AWS.

In a continued effort to improve and scale to meet market demand Microstar made the decision to move their mission critical business applications to AWS. Great Plains financials, next-gen TAP3 ERP application and various others. Microstar engaged Eplexity to handle architecture and migration of on-prem systems to AWS.

Next came Microstar’s decision to move away from current traditional MSP to a more sophisticated, cloud-oriented next gen provider. While we had established trust and were well entrenched in refactoring effort they decided to release a formal RFP for full managed services spanning procurement, desktop support across multiple locations, on-prem servers and network, AWS cloud as well as comprehensive security monitoring and incident response. Microstar evaluated proposals from large nationals such as AT&T and Rackspace to larger well-known local Denver MSPs. We secured the business through a combination of our proven success on previous engagements, competitive pricing, high-touch customer service, and our cloud and on-prem software and systems expertise.

Solution 1

Enhanced and refactored Microstar's core application to cloud native services on AWS.

Migrated mission critical applications to AWS.

Solution 2

Migrated mission critical applications systems to AWS.

Solution 3

Hired EPLEXITY for 24/7/365 Managed IT Services.

Results

In early 2019 Microstar landed a game changing customer that doubled their business overnight. A true milestone for their business and thanks to their strategic investments Microstar was able to successfully scale and meet onboarding deadlines. This included the build-out and turn-up of a new state of the art keg handling and logistics center in Eagle Pass, Texas. Eplexity CXOS® Managed Services worked side-by-side with their team onsite in Eagle Pass implementing their Highly Available end-to-end IT/Cloud Infrastructure.

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