Executive Summary

Sherpa provides the software and services to make its clients successful.  They are dedicated to public sector budgeting, including business process consulting, software implementation, reporting and publishing, and ERP integration.  Their customer focus is unparalleled; their results unmatched. Their Budget Formulation and Management (BFM) Application is a robust budget preparation application that includes operating and capital budgeting, in-year budget management, performance management, grant planning, grant management, user fees, and the most comprehensive personnel forecasting engine on the market.  Sherpa also provides its clients with the most complete business intelligence in the industry. Combined with an average of 18 years of public sector budgeting experience, their team provides expert consulting based on a wide breadth of client successes and challenges.

The Challenge

As a leader in Public Sector Budgeting Applications, Sherpa Government Solutions works with large, complex cities, counties, K-12, and states. 

In April 2015, The Smart Panda was retained to provide a platform on AWS that would meet Sherpa Government Solutions’ strict security, compliance, and performance requirements, allowing them to develop and implement their solutions in the cloud for their clients.

The Smart Solution

Leveraging its experience in Architecture Design and its AWS Cloud Partnership, The Smart Panda delivered an enterprise-class platform for Sherpa’s flagship state client, consisting of cloud-based infrastructure and automation which allows the state to produce their budgets and reports effectively and efficiently.

Once the platform was in place, The Smart Panda worked with Sherpa Government Solutions and their application team to deliver the Budget Formation and Management Application (BFM) as a cloud-based enterprise application. Additionally, Smart Panda enabled Sherpa to deliver a business intelligence reporting solution using SAP Business Objects as a cloud-based enterprise integration with their BFM Application.

The Smart Panda was able to use its extensive implementation experience to upgrade the application to use the latest SQL Server Database and bring the entire platform online within a week. We were able to leverage many services and tools within AWS Cloud to facilitate this implementation, including Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), EBS & S3 Storage, Route 53, RDS Database Service, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Lambda Function Service, Simple Email Service (SES), Life Cycle Management Services, Automated Backup Services, and Database Migration Service (DMS).

The Benefits

Working closely with the Sherpa team, The Smart Panda helped Sherpa to realize several firsts including:

  • Successful delivery of the first cloud-based application to its clients
  • An upgraded Database Platform on the AWS cloud
  • A successful cloud-based platform on the AWS Cloud

Sherpa now has the ability to significantly increase the speed of innovation through:

  • An infrastructure that allows multi-client development and production environments to support different release into the AWS Cloud environment, allowing Sherpa development teams to deliver new features and applications faster
  • Enhanced reliability, scalability, and security of the platform with the ability to provision robust production-ready environments as needed

By partnering with Smart Panda and leveraging their Cloud Services provided by AWS and their Managed Services, we were able to deliver our Budget Formulation and Management Application (BFM) to our clients, who can access the solution from both home and office. We are well positioned to deliver new functionality and service to our clients and have the ability to provide service guarantees that satisfy and exceed their expectations.

—David Farrell – CEO Sherpa Government Solutions