Bloomreach: Scaling when it matters most, with Google Cloud
About Bloomreach
Bloomreach is the world’s #1 Commerce Experience Cloud, empowering brands to deliver customer journeys so personalized, they feel like magic. It offers a suite of products that drive true personalization and digital commerce growth, including: Discovery, offering AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, offering a headless CMS; and Engagement, offering a leading CDP and marketing automation solutions. Together, these solutions combine the power of unified customer and product data with the speed and scale of AI-optimization, enabling revenue-driving digital commerce experiences that convert on any channel and every journey. Bloomreach serves over 850 global brands including Albertsons, Bosch, Puma, FC Bayern München, and Marks & Spencer. For more information, visit Bloomreach.com.
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Contact usBloomreach Engagement is a scalable, AI-enabled Customer Data Platform + Marketing Automation solution with global reach that can withstand the Black Friday peak with ease.
Google Cloud results
- Scales infrastructure to handle more than double the normal load during Black Friday with minimal cost
- Speeds up development of new features and bug fixes, deploying in seconds rather than minutes
- Empowers developers to go beyond test environments and take responsibility for the full life cycle of their products
Processes around 7 billion events per client
For companies with an online presence, connecting with customers is one of the biggest challenges, but also among the most rewarding. If a company can combine the convenience of online shopping with quality service, it has the potential to create a genuine connection with its customers. Bloomreach Engagement's Customer Data Platform (CDP), with built-in marketing automation, helps ecommerce retailers interact more effectively with customers through its online platform. "We help our clients scale the personalization of their customer experience, using AI modules to deliver the most relevant content and offers," says Lenka Gondová. "With the Bloomreach Engagement platform, clients take total control of their customer experience, automating messaging over multiple marketing channels, at each stage of the customer life cycle."
"Every time we gained more clients, we lost development velocity because we were managing the infrastructure ourselves. We needed a new infrastructure with managed services that could help us scale up without compromising on agility. For us, that was Google Cloud."
—Szabolcs Balogh, VP of Technology, BloomreachSince Bloomreach Engagement, then Exponea, launched in 2015, its progress has been spectacular—almost quadrupling in size since then. By late 2017, the growth in customers began to strain the company's bare-metal IT infrastructure. With GDPR regulations on the horizon and a global client base, Bloomreach Engagement had to prepare for a more complex security environment. Its existing infrastructure was simply not capable of handling what was coming, so the team turned to Google Cloud.
"Every time we gained more clients, we lost development velocity because we were managing the infrastructure ourselves," says Szabolcs Balogh, VP of Technology for Bloomreach. "We needed a new solution with managed services that could help us scale up without compromising on agility. For us, that was Google Cloud."
Scalability, flexibility, security with Google Kubernetes Engine
As Bloomreach Engagement grew, the company began to reach the limits of its bare-metal infrastructure. It wasn't just development that was affected but stability as well. "We had servers go down, and then the backups at our data center provider didn't have good connections," says Lenka. "We didn't ever want to be in a situation where our service was affected." By late 2017, it was clear that the company needed a more scalable, stable, and secure infrastructure.
After testing the leading cloud vendors, the Bloomreach Engagement team chose Google Cloud for its new solution. "It really stood out from the competition because of its ease of use," says Szabolcs. "We knew we could quickly migrate to a Google Cloud solution without too much trouble." The global reach of Google Cloud also meant that Bloomreach Engagement could respond to its clients' different needs. "For GDPR, some of our clients wanted to keep all their data in Europe. Others wanted to keep theirs in the USA. With Google Cloud, we could do both easily," says Lenka.
"Google Cloud integrates its products very well. If you get some data, you can store it in Google Cloud Storage until you need it, and analyze it in Google BigQuery in just a few minutes. You don't have to spend a day setting up new infrastructure."
—Szabolcs Balogh, VP of Technology, BloomreachAs Bloomreach Engagement began migrating to Google Cloud, it saw the value of a service-based infrastructure and began to redesign its architecture around containers rather than just virtual machines. "It wasn't like changing the wheels on a car," says Szabolcs. "More like replacing the car with a plane!" Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) was the backbone of the new infrastructure, orchestrating the stateless services that Bloomreach Engagement used in its platform. For the few stateful services that Exponea needed, such as databases, the company used virtual machines with Compute Engine, which it could spin up and shut down as needed. For Bloomreach's AI platform, Cloud Storage held the data sources, which had been processed with Dataproc, and GKE was used to train and deploy the prediction models. Over the course of 2018, Bloomreach Engagement worked to refine its infrastructure even further to make more effective use of Google Cloud products, using BigQuery for data analytics and Google Cloud operations suite for monitoring and logging.
"Google Cloud integrates its products very well," says Szabolcs. "If you get some data, you can store it in Cloud Storage until you need it, and analyze it in BigQuery in just a few minutes. You don't have to spend a day setting up new infrastructure."
Peak performance, flattened costs
The big test for Bloomreach Engagement's new infrastructure came on Black Friday, 2018, the busiest retail event of the year for much of the world. The load on servers for Bloomreach Engagement was often much bigger than the previous year's because the company was not only winning more customers, it was winning bigger customers. "In 2017, our average customer would generate around 500 million events monthly," says Lenka. "In 2018, that number was more than 7 billion."
"Google Cloud really helped us to make better use of their products and save money. As a result, we could dramatically increase our CPU and memory usage while keeping costs flat. We could deliver a stable service to more customers without having to pass the cost on to them."
—Lenka Gondová, Data Privacy Officer, BloomreachOver the course of the year, the company worked extensively with Google Cloud to optimize its architecture for the unique challenges it faced. Opting for the premium level of support from Google Cloud meant that Bloomreach Engagement could discuss its goals in depth with technical account managers who could recommend the best products and implementation strategies. Thanks to Google Cloud, Bloomreach Engagement's platform more than doubled its usual load in just two weeks and delivered a reliably smooth service to its customers.
"Google Cloud really helped us to make better use of its products and save money," says Lenka. "As a result, we could dramatically increase our CPU and memory usage while keeping costs flat. We could deliver a stable service to more customers without having to pass the cost on to them."
The migration to Google Cloud has also helped Bloomreach's IT team to work in much faster, more efficient cycles. "In the past, deploying new versions could take between 20 minutes and an hour and the more customers we had, the longer development would take," says Szabolcz. "With Google Cloud, we can deploy in under 20 seconds, and this doesn't change, no matter how many new customers we've added." Using managed services in GKE and other Google Cloud products has helped to empower developers to take on responsibility for new projects and not have to wait on DevOps staff to set up new infrastructure.
"It's really changed the culture of our development," says Matúš Cimerman, an engineer and Google Cloud professional at Bloomreach. "Now every developer is responsible for the entire life cycle of the products they work on, and they're not just focused on how it performs in the testing environment. It's helped to make us better developers overall."
As Bloomreach Engagement goes from strength to strength, it continues to look for new ways to improve its platform. The company is currently exploring Google Cloud machine learning and AI tools to see what insight can be gained from its internal monitoring and how that can be converted into even greater efficiencies. Bloomreach Engagement's close relationship with Google Cloud has been key to solving both the problems of the present and mapping out a path for the future. "We've been able to concentrate on growing our business, and we look forward to more of the same with Google Cloud at our side," says Lenka.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Bloomreach
Bloomreach is the world’s #1 Commerce Experience Cloud, empowering brands to deliver customer journeys so personalized, they feel like magic. It offers a suite of products that drive true personalization and digital commerce growth, including: Discovery, offering AI-driven search and merchandising; Content, offering a headless CMS; and Engagement, offering a leading CDP and marketing automation solutions. Together, these solutions combine the power of unified customer and product data with the speed and scale of AI-optimization, enabling revenue-driving digital commerce experiences that convert on any channel and every journey. Bloomreach serves over 850 global brands including Albertsons, Bosch, Puma, FC Bayern München, and Marks & Spencer. For more information, visit Bloomreach.com.