Global architecture studio leverage data analytics with Nasuni and AWS
About Perkins+Will
Founded in 1935, Chicago-based Perkins+Will is one of the world’s premier architecture and design firms. The company has expanded exponentially over the last two decades and now operates twenty-eight global design studios on nearly every continent. Perkins+Will employs 2,500 of some of the brightest designers in the world and prioritizes sustainability, health and wellness, innovation, social purpose, and diversity.The challenge
Perkins+Will face storage challenges as their company began to scale.
As the award-winning and environmentally conscious firm increased in size and reach, the challenge of protecting, managing, and accurately provisioning storage in all locations grew as well. The firm’s leadership tasked the IT team with finding innovative solutions that would support a more global, collaborative business model. In 2013, after an intensive search and evaluation, Perkins+Will chose Nasuni.How Nasuni helped Perkins+Will
Nasuni’s Continuous File Versioning™ and The Nasuni Management Console partnered with Amazon S3, overhauled and strengthened Perkins+Will’s IT system.
Perkins+Will was one of the first firms in its industry to grasp the transformative potential of cloud infrastructure. Under the guidance of its IT leadership team, the firm turned to Nasuni and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to overhaul file storage, data protection, global multi-site collaboration, and more. As the partnership between the firm and its solution providers has strengthened over the years, Perkins+Will has continued to push IT innovation, increasing its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) services to unlock the value of its unstructured data.Today, Nasuni has empowered Perkins+Will with a high-performance infrastructure that stores unstructured data in limitless Amazon S3 object storage and extends fast access and automatic data protection to all 28 of the firm’s global design studios.
The impact of Nasuni and AWS at Perkins+Will can be distilled into five key benefits:
1. Cost
60% cost savings, relative to continuing with traditional infrastructure, as the firm’s cloud footprint has grown by 10X
2. Speed
Perkins+Will has extended global high-performance file access to all studios, accelerating business cycles and collaborative workflows
3. Agility
The firm now has a nimbler, on-demand, and elastic approach to file infrastructure that supports its growth and global strategy
4. Innovation
Perkins+Will has long been an innovation leader in its industry, and the move to Nasuni and AWS further cements its position
5. AI & ML
By moving its file data to the cloud with Nasuni, Perkins+Will can reimagine analytics and business intelligence and capitalize immediately as more advanced tools come online
Nasuni Continuous File Versioning™ partnered with Amazon S3 enables recovery and storage.
In addition to these high-level benefits, Nasuni Continuous File Versioning™ has replaced the firm’s backup system, reduced cost and complexity, and improved recovery point and recovery time objectives (RPO and RTO). Amazon S3 increases storage durability by replicating all the firm’s data to multiple data centers in different regions, and Nasuni’s use of immutable object storage protects the firm against ransomware attacks, allowing rapid recoveries that minimize the malware’s potential impact on the business.The Nasuni Management Console (NMC) simplified IT operations for Perkins+Wills.
The Nasuni Management Console (NMC) has also proven to be an essential tool for IT, and Nasuni and AWS have successfully supported key strategic initiatives, including the global studio model, an M&A-driven approach to growth, and the aforementioned desire to leverage intelligent analytics.Amazon S3 and Nasuni are supporting a global studio model.
When the firm’s leadership made the strategic decision to shift to a global studio model, Perkins+Will needed the file infrastructure to support the move. “We wanted to be able to bring in the best resources from the best places, so we could use designers from any one of our 24 studios for any project,” explains Murali Selveraj, CIO of Perkins + Will. “We wanted to be able to bring together a designed in Boston and an architect in London to work on a project in Italy being run by our studio in Dubai.”If Perkins+Will had attempted this global, collaborative model using traditional storage infrastructure, the firm’s costs would have skyrocketed, and inefficiencies and delays would have run rampant. Amazon S3 and Nasuni allowed Perkins+Will to build a true high- performance global storage infrastructure that also saved the firm money. “We can move data from one place to another place, but we still have that single source of truth across all our studios around the world,” adds Selvaraj. “So, we’re not replicating data from one place to another and creating these inefficiencies. If you think about the drivers for why Nasuni is at Perkins+Will, it’s fundamentally about economics and rock-solid, reliable performance.”
Nasuni enables 4X acceleration of M&A integrations.
Perkins+Will expands by acquiring smaller firms. Both the newly acquired studio and the firm at large want the integration to happen as quickly as possible, so Perkins+Will can see ROI, and start leveraging the new talent, and the new studio can begin to tap into its new resources. In the past, integrating these new locations would have been a hassle. Provisioning storage when these studios ran out of capacity would have been time-consuming and expensive. Nasuni is designed to simplify the process of integrating newly acquired companies, studios, or offices, all with a minimal impact on end users.Selveraj estimates that the firm has reduced integration time from 12 months to 3 months thanks to Nasuni and AWS. And that 3-month delay is largely due to people, not technology. “This speed was not possible previously,” Selveraj says, “and it is impacting the business because we can get our clients the best people as quickly as possible.”
Nasuni unlocks artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
Now that file data is stored in a Nasuni/AWS S3 solution instead of being siloed at different global locations, Perkins+Will can leverage cloud-based advanced AWS AI and ML tools like Amazon Kendra, Amazon Rekognition, and others. One of the initial use cases is visual search across past project files. When a new project opportunity arises, architects can search for specific elements in the proposal, find similar work the firm has successfully completed in the past, and thereby demonstrate their track record and ability to deliver.Typically, searching for specific project characteristics, such as mixed-use facilities near rivers, or east-facing office buildings with rooftop gardens, or even doors of a specific size or color would be all but impossible, as such details aren’t always captured in a file’s metadata. Yet Perkins+Will can now use advanced AI/ML tools like AWS Recognition to index such details, then make this index available to designers and architects preparing or submitting proposals. This is only possible because Nasuni can make this file data available to these services through the Nasuni Analytics Connector.
The firm has also run analytics on more than 500,000 drawings and photos of the company’s projects. When working on a new project, designers can now search for graphics that illustrate how other, similar projects were designed and completed. This capability gets projects moving faster, in addition to helping them bid on new work.
Our file data contains all the fundamental and institutional knowledge of our firm over the last 80 years. As we leverage Nasuni to tap into that knowledge using AI and ML tools powered by AWS, we can drive intelligence, institutional knowledge, and new business for the firm.
The Nasuni difference
Perkins+Will plans to continue exploring more AI & ML services in the months ahead, and this is only possible because its file data is securely available in the cloud with Nasuni and AWS. While the potential of intelligent analytics is an exciting prospect for the years to come, Perkins+Will is equally pleased with how their new cloud infrastructure has brought them closer to clients as they continue to globalize, improve their bottom line, and strengthen the firm’s data protection capabilities with rapid ransomware recovery. Thanks in part to Nasuni and AWS, employee and executive confidence in IT has never been higher.Industry: Architecture, engineering and construction
Cloud file storage: Nasuni
Object storage:AWS
Use cases: NAS consolidation; data protection; global file synchronization
Benefits: 60% cost reduction; global high-performance file infrastructure; 4X acceleration in post-M&A integration; AI/ML services; rapid ransomware recovery; reliable business continuity