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Eric Hoffman, CEODatastream Connexion is the founders, sole developers, and platform managers for the CoreSHIELD platform, covering portals like FoodSHIELD, FERN, NAHLN, ICLN, Task Forces, PetNET, SampleNet, LivestockNET and more. The highly customizable platform consists of over 29 modules and applications to support diverse workflows and missions. Developed and deployed globally by Datastream Connexion, this multilingual platform supports cancer patients from treatment through survivorship. Further, Datastream has also developed an intervention platform to address and properly treat different stages of kidney failure between General Practitioners and Nephrologists.
Following is the conversation that CIO Applications had with Eric Hoffman, the CEO of Datastream Connexion, to understand how the company brings its clients’ technology ideas to life.
In your interactions with the CIOs of leading companies, what are the challenges they face in the Amazon Cloud space? How is DataStream Connexion effectively addressing these issues?
The cloud space is rapidly evolving, and gone are the times you could be a cloud generalist and perform adequately across services in one cloud much less across different providers.
AWS has rapidly evolving services. Many that we focus on are in the security and compliance areas as we look to provide the best in class security for our SaaS products. Uniquely, we find that as Amazon attempts to support more services internally, you have a pitched struggle with how to align your security posture. Do you roll over to many of their services to move towards highly flexible and automated security capabilities? Or, do you stay with the long time vendors that you trust in their solutions providing the security and compliance you require?
Looking at cloud as a “set of code” rather than a series of services to manually manage like in the past, it becomes attractive to focus on adopting a reasonably automated infrastructure that responds to ever-changing events. Like others, our focus has been to drill deeply into those services that directly impact our bottom line and relegate the noise to the background with the broader services that don’t require visibility into them. We then identify 3-4 new or updated AWS services each half-year and review potential value-adds and integration into our SaaS product or cloud management.
When we expand internationally, the similarity and relative simplicity of expanding our footprint into foreign areas have been key to our ability to adapt to new requirements, whether Canada, Europe, or elsewhere.
Our team gets to focus heavily on our core offerings by allowing AWS to conduct heavy lifting in creating tools that would be prohibitive for us to develop on our own
How is Datastream Connexion strategically guiding businesses with their technology initiatives with the help of AWS?
AWS has allowed us to create a blueprint for deploying new “private cloud” each time for our customers. We do not tend to lump all customers in our SaaS world under one primary cloud; each customer receives dedicated accounts and private clouds that the SaaS product work in. This provides enhanced data privacy and protection, which creates more comfort from our stakeholders. Security and compliance are truly at the heart of our vision, not just a by-product of needing to meet an audit.
Our team gets to focus heavily on our core offerings by allowing AWS to conduct heavy lifting in creating tools that would be prohibitive for us to develop on our own. Think about photo and video recognition engines. We wouldn’t build that, but we leverage these services to enhance digital discovery for specific customers. Likewise, the other “set it and forget it” type of services like Lambda, SNS, and SES is so reliable it allows us to engage with our customers and improve the product, not babysit servers. We view AWS as a toolbox, with nuts and bolts and various sundries, and this variety allows us to develop custom solutions in less time and at reasonable costs compared to other methods.
Please cite a case study where Datastream Connexion has enabled clients to overcome hurdles and attain desired outcomes.
Many of our customers on our SaaS platform rely on us to not just develop to today’s needs but to identify and support possible future needs. This was evident in several cases we can highlight. During the BP Horizon Gulf Oil Spill, our laboratory partners needed to rapidly identify how to scale testing capability nationally and pull relevant data and dashboards to help inform emergency response leaders where the oil was going and how it impacted the food supply. We built a rapid response, creating dashboards and reports within days, which helped the clients frame a proper planning method and response to the oil spill.
During COVID-19, states needed to adopt a new way to communicate with regulated firms rapidly. Traditional scenarios of sending emails or manual phone calls would not work when the staff was fully engulfed in response efforts and adapting to working remotely. Our Alerts system was implemented previously for low throughput notifications to support regional flooding alerts, boil order alerts, etc. We modified the entire system in 2 weeks to address the need for high throughput messaging that simultaneously sent emails, text alerts, and called landline phones and used text to audio to share information to live people and voicemails. We increased the pipeline with our vendor partners and implemented new abilities to track and verify the efficacy of that messaging. This allows state departments to alert all in a timely fashion, and further use new functionality that let you target messages to zip codes, counties, or a radius. We worked diligently with state partners to address changing needs, test the solutions, and get it to production in short order.
What differentiates Datastream Connexion from its competitors?
Our advantages have revolved around horizon mapping, nimble adoption, security-first, and a dedicated focus on our customer needs. We have specialists in our organization that can quickly adapt, modify, or incrementally improve our products with speed; all developers, though are cross-trained, so they understand how a large platform like ours functions both at code and infrastructure levels. We have found success in responding to national response needs like the Gulf Oil Spill or COVID 19.
Our clients rely on us to guide them in their path toward the future and to develop solutions that are ready when the time is needed. This was evident in our internal approach of loosely coupled services that allowed us to pull together a functional new update and product for national use in weeks, not months.
What does the future hold for Datastream Connexion?
We plan to work towards more services that support data exchange and collaboration in food, agriculture, and public health sectors as we do today and expand to other verticals we can support with a battle-tested SaaS platform. With the era of remote work and slashed budgets, our businesses and government staff will be required to make Herculean efforts with fewer resources. We are here to support them.
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