Q&A with Simon Funk, CEO and Founder of Tree Stones
Tree Stones is a leading global digital agency based in Zurich, Switzerland founded in 2008. The company serves clients around the globe, providing a diverse range of technical and creative services including software development and web services hosting. As a result of their new partnership with Jelastic, the Tree Stones team is now capable of ultra-streamlined development and deployment for clients because of Jelastic’s expertise in Multi-Cloud Orchestration, Containerization and Digitalization.
Tree Stones’s partnership with Jelastic enables the organization to scale-up or scale-down client services fast, and cost-effectively, paying only for what is used. And since Jelastic is an advanced Multi-Cloud Platform-as-a-Service provider, this allows Tree Stones to focus on their business growth instead of spending resources and team efforts on IT infrastructure configuration and management that may change rapidly as client demands evolve.
This new partnership allows Tree Stones to be nimble and responsive to the changing landscapes which their varied customers operate within. For their customers, the new partnership with Jelastic delivers a competitive edge as their technology infrastructure can be scaled and adapted to immediately meet changing requirements.
When digital agencies are evaluating hosting solutions and cloud hosting platforms for clients there are several things they need to keep in mind:
- Scalability - eliminate worries about load spikes when new projects need high-availability and scalability based on load. Thanks to Jelastic, Tree Stones has the capability of automatic scaling based on load. The appropriate resources are provisioned when required.
- Pricing Model - with Jelastic’s pay-per-use pricing model, they only pay for what they use. This is a tremendous benefit for the business owners and their customers. It allows companies to scale cost-effectively.
- Ease-of-Use - thanks to simplified cloud management and an intuitive UI, agencies can manage all projects through a Jelastic single panel. Pre-configurations and automation enable quick installation, efficient deployment, scaling and clustering.
What is the core expertise of Tree Stones?
Tree Stones is a digital agency providing a full range of website and application development, hosting services and infrastructure to our customers. We provide our customers the technology and digital presence necessary to grow efficiently, and sustain digital leadership and engagement in their industries.
As a digital experience agency, we understand how to respond to customer requests and we deliver customized solutions that meet the needs of our diverse customers. We leverage leading-edge technology innovations and embrace new solutions to help us advance the goals of our customers.
Our specialists and partners implement complex projects with dedication, and our core competencies include the following:
- Strategy & Consulting
- Digital Solutions
- Digital Marketing
- Mobile App Development
What software and applications do you use? Why did you choose them and how they solve your required tasks?
Our team has extensive knowledge of programming languages including PHP, SQL, JavaScript, in particular jQuery, HTML and CSS. We also use the latest technologies for example, HTML5 and CSS3.
We utilize Open Source software for our clients from Magento and Shopware, to Drupal and Pimcore. For custom webapps we are using Laravel. We also have access to a full spectrum of industry-leading solutions that we utilize to help our customers achieve the goals that are most important to their business.
What are your and your customers’ requirements for cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting needs to be easy to manage, scaleable and stable. Reliability and ease-of-use are critically important so we can adapt to the changing needs of our customers immediately as they change and grow.
What hosting solutions did you previously use?
Before working with Jelastic, we used shared hosting solutions or dedicated servers. Occasionally, we used AWS or Digital Ocean, but these solutions left us with unmet needs. Jelastic delivers technology that empowers us to meet our customers’ needs no matter how sophisticated or challenging they are.
Why have you decided to choose Jelastic PaaS?
The initial driver for our choice of Jelastic PaaS was local hosting. But once we adopted Jelastic’s ecosystem of technologies, we quickly learned how robust their capabilities are and how easy it is to deploy the right solutions at precisely the right time to fit our needs.
With what Jelastic hosting provider do you work and why?
We work with Trendhosting, a service provider with a datacenter in Switzerland. Their technical knowledge is exceptional and they seem to anticipate our needs in terms of support. So the collaboration has been seamless.
Jelastic and Trendhosting are committed partners in responding to any needs we have in order to ensure regulatory compliance, as well as high-performance in all other areas that are relevant to our business and our customers.
What do you think about containerization within the platform? How do you handle container management?
Containerization allows developers to move more quickly, and to operate at an unprecedented scale because software can be deployed with great efficiency. We were able to migrate from a VM-based infrastructure to a container-based infrastructure very easily. Now we can split all services to different containers and manage them independently. Also, containers are far more lightweight, so we’ve got a huge upgrade in terms of efficiency.
Can you share your future outlook?
We see a multitude of new opportunities to continue developing our partnership and collaboration with Jelastic in the future. With each deployment we learn about new benefits and features that can help us to secure new customers and retain existing customers as they grow and their needs become more complex.
The Jelastic cloud platform is designed for ISVs, digital agencies, e-commerce service providers needing to speed up and simplify applications deployment, reduce infrastructure cost, improve uptime and enhance security of running services. Willing to automate creation, scaling, clustering and security updates of your applications? Try out Jelastic PaaS at one of the available cloud service providers.
