Mission Cloud Services Wins TechTarget Award for its Innovative AWS Machine Learning Work with JibJab

TechTarget’s SearchITChannel selects Mission’s recent project with JibJab, which leveraged machine learning to successfully launch a new physical product line for the pioneer of personalized e-cards

LOS ANGELES, Calif. – April 12, 2022 – Mission, a managed cloud services provider and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Services Partner, today announced the company has won a 2021 Top Projects Award from TechTarget’s SearchITChannel. The annual award honors three IT services partners and their customers for exceptional technological initiatives that demonstrate compelling innovation, creative partnering, and business-wide benefits.

JibJab sought support from an AWS partner to achieve its goals around image quality and customer experience as it prepared to launch its user-designed Starring You Books. For the iconic digital entertainment studio known for enabling users to send personalized e-cards, the books would mark the company’s first expansion into a physical product line. During the project’s initial planning process, JibJab realized the opportunity to utilize a machine learning computer vision algorithm to detect faces within user-uploaded photos. The algorithm would need to automatically crop faces and hair from photos and perform post-processing to prepare print-quality images. Without the in-house ML expertise to build this algorithm – and wanting to avoid the cost-prohibitive licensing fees of using an existing ML algorithm – JibJab partnered with Mission to develop and complete the project. 

Mission leveraged its AWS machine learning expertise to build and train the algorithm, implementing a process that included data labeling and augmentation with a training set of 17,000 images. Experts from Mission’s Data, Analytics & Machine Learning practice created JibJab’s solution using several solutions, including Amazon SageMaker, Amazon Rekognition, and Facebook’s Detectron2. This work has resulted in a seamless self-service experience for JibJab customers, who can upload their photos and have final, book-ready images prepared by the ML algorithm in just five seconds. Customers then simply place the final images within their personalized Starring You Books products using a GUI, and approve their work for printing.

Quotes 
“We talked to a few external companies and Mission was our clear preference,” said Matt Cielecki, VP of Engineering at JibJab. “It became evident from day one that Mission wasn’t just going to throw something over the fence for us to use; the team was going to ensure that we understood the rationale behind the processes and technologies put into action.”

“Mission’s work with JibJab showcases the tremendous potential AWS and ML can enable for developing innovative new products and unprecedented customer experiences,” said Ryan Ries, Practice Lead, Data Science & Engineering at Mission. “We jumped at the opportunity to work with JibJab on this project and are proud of the success of the project – and to have the work recognized with TechTarget SearchITChannel’s 2021 Top Projects Award.”

About Mission Cloud Services
Mission accelerates enterprise cloud transformation by delivering a differentiated suite of agile cloud services and consulting. As an AWS Premier Services Partner, Mission’s always-on services enable businesses to scale and outpace competitors by leveraging the most transformative technology platform and enterprise software ecosystem in history.