As it had when developing the Wenngarn mobile app, Sisyfos chose IBM Cloud® as the hosting environment for its new OVERBLIQ platform. By building and deploying the infrastructure on IBM Cloud, Sisyfos can offer its customers a WordPress-like platform on which to build their content-rich mobile apps. Customers focus on content development and management, while Sisyfos offers solution-as-a-service (SaaS) support and hosting.
“We had used IBM Cloud in other projects,” says Jimmy Eriksson, Chief Executive Officer at Sisyfos. “It was the least expensive platform to build on, and it had the all the functions that we needed for building a platform for mobile apps.”
Robin Eriksson concurs: “It suited our needs perfectly. Everything was packaged very neatly to host our solution.”
Sisyfos is using IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service and several IBM Cloud managed services offerings, including IBM® Certificate Manager, IBM Cloud Command Line Interface, IBM Cloud File Storage, IBM Cloud Log Analysis, IBM Cloud Monitoring with Sysdig and IBM Cloud Object Storage. The platform also includes critical databases such as IBM Cloud Databases for PostgreSQL and IBM Cloud Databases for Redis.
“When we talk to the developers, what they really like is the ease of having things deployed on Kubernetes,” Robin Eriksson continues. “If we were looking at other solutions, we would need an infrastructure-as-a-service offering; we’d need to host our own virtual machines and deploy Kubernetes ourselves. We’d need to take all these extra steps just to get where we were from day one with IBM Cloud.”
Robin Eriksson also touts the flexibility and speed of the IBM Cloud Object Storage service. “We have a lot of image content, and it needs to be available in various formats,” he says. “Storage today isn’t really a problem. But we also need to have really hot access, where we’re not requesting images from an archive. We need to get rid of all the latency and have it cached, so when the user calls up a picture of a boat, they immediately see a boat.”
The (boat) show must go on
Offering a cost-effective development solution that allows its customers to quickly launch interactive, content-driven mobile apps proved its value for Sisyfos during the COVID-19 pandemic. One such customer, Stockholmsmässan, the largest event organizer in Sweden, turned to Sisyfos to make its annual boat convention a digital reality.
In 2020, the pandemic hit during the Allt för Sjön (All About Boats) trade fair, held in early March each year. Signaling the start of the boating season, it draws over 70,000 visitors and 400 exhibitors. For the 2021 show, Stockholmsmässan needed to create an Allt för Sjön digital mobile app to bring those visitors and exhibitors together, entirely online.
As a company whose focus is on in-person conventions, Stockholmsmässan needed a digital pro to make an online convention a success. “We’re not structured to do anything in this field at all because we don’t have the app developers and support internally,” says Tommy Bryngelsson, Digital Manager at Stockholmsmässan. “And it’s my firm belief that if it’s out there, you shouldn’t develop it yourself. You should try to find the best solution that fits your needs, and then adapt it to your situation.” For Stockholmsmässan, that solution was the OVERBLIQ platform and the support it received from Sisyfos.
Stockholmsmässan created the content for the Allt för Sjön app and then invited boat and boating lifestyle vendors to add their own content to reach visitors. “Looking back, it’s been quite difficult to get the exhibitors to actually provide their own information, because the other digital solutions we’ve had weren’t user friendly,” says Bryngelsson. “The OVERBLIQ platform is very user friendly, very straightforward.”
The OVERBLIQ customized editor interface doesn’t require any specialized coding or editing training or experience. Sisyfos developed the platform to make design as easy as possible from a user standpoint, while still providing quality control.
“If you upload an image with the wrong dimensions, the wizard will let you know that this image is not usable,” says Bryngelsson. “Other tools might let you upload it anyway, which makes the overall quality of the platform feel lower.”
The Allt för Sjön app proved wildly successful for Stockholmsmässan. “It shot to number four on the app store on launch day,” according to Bryngelsson. And the IBM Cloud seamlessly supported the huge jump in users.