Dialpad: Empowering the anywhere worker with Google Cloud

About Dialpad

Dialpad is communications simplified for every business. A privately held company in San Francisco, Dialpad is experiencing rapid growth by replacing arcane desk phones and expensive PBX systems with a pure cloud business phone system for voice, video, messaging, and conferencing. To enable scalability and productivity at workplaces around the globe, Dialpad leverages the Google Cloud Platform and is fully integrated with Google Workspace applications.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States

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To achieve fast time to market and scale smoothly, Dialpad uses Google App Engine to speed development, and Google Cloud Datastore and Google BigQuery to store and analyze vast amounts of call data.

Google Cloud Results

  • Supports 443% business growth over 3 years, while doubling developer productivity
  • Enables faster release cycle for new features in applications
  • Aligns with enterprise-focused sales strategy, serving businesses with 20,000+ users

Grew 443% in just 3 years

One of the fastest growing companies in the United States, Dialpad is out to make your desk phone obsolete. The company offers a cloud solution used by nearly 50,000 businesses to give employees access to voice, text, video, and conferencing from any device. Assigning phone numbers is quick and easy, and businesses can avoid the cost of expensive phone systems and hardware, while allowing employees to use their devices of choice.

Dialpad has Google in its DNA. Founded by the creators of Google Voice, Dialpad natively integrates with productivity suites, such as Google Workspace, to provide a cloud-first, mobile solution for today’s anywhere worker. Dialpad grew 443% in revenue between 2013 and 2016, landing it in Deloitte’s 2017 Technology Fast 500, and today the company has approximately 200 employees.

“Developing Dialpad on Google Cloud Platform allowed us to grow much faster and expand the core of our business. We could focus on what matters to our customers and improve productivity. Without Google Cloud Platform, we’d need twice as many people to achieve this velocity.”

Nick Foster, Tech Lead, Dialpad

As a startup, Dialpad needed scalable infrastructure to maximize staff efficiency and bring its pure-cloud products to market quickly. It decided to use two separate clouds: bare-metal servers for media processing, and Google Cloud Platform for its customer-facing frontend, user data, call routing, business logic, and ongoing software development.

“Developing Dialpad on Google Cloud Platform allowed us to grow much faster and expand the core of our business,” says Nick Foster, Tech Lead at Dialpad. “We could focus on what matters to our customers and improve productivity. Without Google Cloud Platform, we’d need twice as many people to achieve this velocity.”

Faster time to market, less risk

Dialpad uses Google App Engine to automatically provision and scale infrastructure on demand to support essential processes, such as initiating and routing users’ video, voice, and conference calls. With autoscaling and load balancing, Dialpad can handle traffic spikes smoothly and more cost effectively. Freed from the hassles of management and monitoring, Dialpad can focus on bringing new features and functionality to market every week.

“We were initially concerned that if we didn’t control the infrastructure, we would be at risk if something went wrong,” says Corey Burke, Tech Lead at Dialpad. “We quickly found that Google handles any issues proactively, the same way we would. We’re reducing risk by using Google Cloud Platform.”

“Google Cloud Datastore is extremely reliable. And for a telephony company, there’s no substitute for Google BigQuery. The ability to crawl over 10 months of unindexed call data in 30 seconds is astounding.”

Corey Burke, Tech Lead, Dialpad

Powerful data processing and analytics

Using simple API calls from Google App Engine, Dialpad is tapping into a rich ecosystem of managed services on Google Cloud Platform. For example, it built a data pipeline using Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Google Cloud Dataflow to ingest and process call data from its media processing servers.

Data is stored in Google Cloud Datastore, a managed NoSQL database, and moved to Google BigQuery for analysis. All Dialpad user information and call history is stored in Google Cloud Datastore, where it is encrypted at rest. Google App Engine logs are sent to Google BigQuery to identify long-term trends that could be impacting application performance.

“We’ve avoided many of the limitations that startups typically face by using managed services on Google Cloud Platform,” says Corey. “Google Cloud Datastore is extremely reliable. And for a telephony company, there’s no substitute for Google BigQuery. The ability to crawl over 10 months of unindexed call data in 30 seconds is astounding.”

Dialpad uses the data to keep call quality high, improve customer experiences, and generate insights that move its business forward. By analyzing messaging and call data records, it can troubleshoot routing issues, identify calling patterns, choose the best carrier partners, and reconcile any billing discrepancies. Dialpad also makes Google BigQuery available to its customers so they can understand their own business communications and make better decisions.

Enabling an enterprise focus

With a scalable, data-driven platform, Dialpad is successfully winning larger enterprise customers, some with 20,000 users or more. As the company expands its services globally, it can rely on the Google network to help connect regional locations to more than 100 global network points of presence close to Dialpad users.

“When we make our sales pitch to large, multinational corporations, it gives them confidence that we’re using Google Cloud Platform,” says Corey. “They know that Google likely has points of presence wherever they do business, and that traffic will get to us reliably.”

“Our decision to build Dialpad on Google Cloud Platform gave us the ability to integrate the power of voice with the everyday tools people need to do their jobs. That’s the power of the cloud—and it’s what excites me most about delivering communications software for the modern workforce.”

Craig Walker, Founder and CEO, Dialpad

Innovative product integrations

Dialpad continues to expand its native integration with Google Workspace, providing users with single sign-on, ongoing two-way directory synch, and useful insights around every call and message. Users can access Google Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Calendar from within the Dialpad app for richer conversations. The Gmail add-on for Dialpad, available in the Google Workspace Marketplace, lets users initiate calls and texts directly from Gmail, and autodetect phone numbers in emails. Dialpad is also a Google Workspace customer, using identity management and two-step verification in Google Workspace to easily control developer access to Google Cloud Platform.

“Our relationship with Google creates an amazing opportunity to help companies do right by their employees by quickly and cost effectively shifting to the best solution for their increasingly diverse and distributed teams,” says Craig Walker, Founder and CEO of Dialpad. “We believe that Dialpad and Google Workspace are better together.”

Google Cloud Machine Learning services are also playing a growing role in Dialpad products. The company uses Google Cloud Speech API to transcribe voicemails on the fly, as well as Google Cloud Natural Language API to analyze sentiments expressed in emails and make smart recommendations. In addition, Dialpad leverages open source technologies supported by Google, including WebRTC, for real-time communications.

“Our decision to build Dialpad on Google Cloud Platform gave us the ability to integrate the power of voice with the everyday tools people need to do their jobs,” says Craig. “That’s the power of the cloud—and it’s what excites me most about delivering communications software for the modern workforce.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Dialpad

Dialpad is communications simplified for every business. A privately held company in San Francisco, Dialpad is experiencing rapid growth by replacing arcane desk phones and expensive PBX systems with a pure cloud business phone system for voice, video, messaging, and conferencing. To enable scalability and productivity at workplaces around the globe, Dialpad leverages the Google Cloud Platform and is fully integrated with Google Workspace applications.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States