Freed from the ongoing costs of network maintenance, Cenique began to save money with AWS almost immediately. “For startups, every dollar matters,” says Shylesh. “With AWS, we’ve reduced our operational expenditure by 60 percent.” This has, in turn, allowed Cenique to invest more time and money into ideas that will help expand the business.

AWS has also freed Cenique from delays in data processing. Since moving to AWS, the company has experienced near 100 percent uptime. The company uses its own custom algorithms hosted in Amazon EC2 to explore and navigate large amounts of data extracted from the in-store cameras. Using AWS Auto Scaling, Cenique is able to run these analytics up to 40 percent faster than before.

Decreasing the amount of time it takes to complete calculations doesn’t just speed things up for Cenique’s customers—it has also encouraged the company to pursue business opportunities in Europe and Asia, confident that additional customers won’t result in unwanted network latency. In June 2014, for example, Cenique began operations in Japan. With AWS, the company was able to copy its U.S. environment and redeploy it in the Tokyo region. “In the past it would have taken at least a month to enter a new market,” says Shylesh. “But with AWS, it took only one week for us to establish ourselves in Japan.”

Developers are currently working on a plan to have Cenique’s digital signage appliances detect and analyze Bluetooth and Wi-Fi networks. This data will allow Cenique to provide deeper insights into what sort of shoppers enter a particular store and how long they stay there. With this information, Cenique’s retail customers will be able to evaluate and optimize sales and merchandising strategies. “AWS understands that data is often unstructured, and comes in various formats,” says Shylesh. “Because of this, we can expand into new areas of data analysis with the confidence that using AWS will help us to identify and exploit previously undetected interrelationships.”

Finally, Cenique has also been able to enhance the security of its network, protecting both its own data and that of its clients. “We’ve taken advantage of our ability to create expiring URLs in Amazon S3, which allows us to control the availability of time-sensitive data,” says Shylesh. “We’ve also used Amazon S3 to encrypt our archived data.”

Cenique now has 10 times more customers than it did when it first started using AWS, and its growth shows no sign of slowing down. “We’re optimistic about the future,” says Shylesh. “And our confidence is largely thanks to the stability, security, and speed that AWS provides.”