Narrative Science lives at the intersection of technology and humanity by taking any type of analytical data—financial reports, graphs, spreadsheets—and turning the numbers into an insightful story that accompanies the data and visualizations. Simply put, they create products that turn business data into plain-English stories.

As their new flagship cloud-based product, Lexio, continues to onboard new customers, Narrative Science needed a new approach to scaling the product economically. Because of the significant operational and accelerated costs of handling large volumes of data, product revenue increases were being outpaced by the increase of cloud costs.

Here’s how we are helping Narrative Science become more agile and nimble, resulting in reduced operational costs, improved cloud architecture, and an ability to scale their product economically.

 

Cost and Cloud Management Transparency

We immediately stepped in to give Narrative Science a clear and holistic view of their current product scaling challenges as well as an action plan to optimize every aspect of their cloud spend.

Through our official partnership with nOps, a cloud management platform for AWS, we provided Narrative Science with a transparent and full view of their AWS cloud bills, along with the ability to easily monitor end-to-end critical cloud functionality.

We quickly identified low-risk tactical changes that resulted in immediate savings and deeper actionable insights on how they can improve their cloud efficiency. These savings and insights gave Narrative Science confidence in the approach and provided a foundation for the next phases of the project that are focused on long-term, predictable costs.

Reduced Cost, Improved Architecture and Governance

To help Narrative Science not only improve the long-term performance of its product but to improve cost, we performed a deep architecture analysis to recommend significant improvements and governance guidelines.

Based on our initial analysis, we uncovered a 20% potential savings in cloud costs, with no impact on their product’s performance. We did this by utilizing a proven framework to analyze and uncover architecture improvements in their operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, and cost optimization.

Together, we implemented governance guardrails that ensured as more customers were onboarded, the costs were kept sustainable and predictable.  This new perspective enabled their executive team to understand their scaling challenges holistically and collaborate with Prime TSR to take proper action based on our recommendations.

Executive Alignment to Achieving Cloud Success

The Narrative Science executive team needed an approach to accelerate the adoption of its flagship product without a high expense-to-operations ratio, and together, we continue to deliver on that promise.

Narrative Science leadership is now more closely aligned with the actions needed for long-term success and can get their product to market faster with a sustainable operating margin that enables faster growth and scalability.  The improved Lexio product infrastructure now makes it easier to add features, create lower price points, and reach more potential customers.

Together, we have an ongoing, formal governance approach to remediate open issues, optimize cloud costs, implement reliability and performance improvements.  Lastly, we have a common governance approach toward maximizing the efficiency of all of their cloud applications.

Scaling and Optimizing Cost Is an On-Going Journey

Due to our original analysis, recommendations, and actions taken for each phase, Narrative Science now has the ongoing ability to scale their Lexio product much more quickly while aligning cost to the customer demand of the product.

Of course, this story doesn't end here. Cost optimization and cloud governance is an ongoing journey that becomes woven into everything an organization does as it continues to grow and evolve. As Narrative Science scales its flagship product, we will collaboratively make adjustments to improve scalability and cost efficiencies.