Fortics boosts omnichannel service platform with a microservices environment
About Fortics
Fortics offers platforms for customer service via WhatsApp, Facebook, Teams, Telegram, Webchat, SMS, email, and voice in an integrated manner. With nearly 100 employees, it has a commercial office in São Paulo, another three offices in Brazil and, soon, a unit in the United States.
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About Somos Nuvem
Somos Nuvem is part of the Chilean Tigabytes group and one of the main Premier Google Cloud Partners in Latin America.
With the migration from a monolithic to a microservices environment in Google Cloud, the company made the management of the SZ.chat platform more efficient and was able to improve its infrastructure with new resources.
Results
- In six months, it progressed the equivalent of one year of work, compared to the monolithic environment.
- Fully automated latency control, with performance improvements and cost predictability.
- Increased team productivity with service management in smaller independent squads.
Environment growth at monthly rates of 25% and 50%.
With customer experience increasingly at the center of service strategies, companies are adopting solutions to be able to respond to consumers efficiently through the different channels in which they are present. For this reason, and in order to help organizations to face this challenge, Fortics, a company specialized in service and telecommunication solutions, launched the SZ.chat platform in 2016.
Thanks to this omnichannel service platform, companies are able to communicate with their customers in an integrated and intelligent way through different channels of instant messaging, email, and voice. SZ.chat is a product that is continuously evolving in order to keep up with the constant changes in channels and users' demands.
However, it had been developed within a monolithic environment, that is, all processes were integrated into a single application. This architecture posed a series of obstacles to the Fortics’ IT team. First, for the time required for development, since each modification impacted the entire system. Second, due to the complexity of providing scalability and stability in a monolithic environment.
In conversation with Somos Nuvem, a Google Cloud partner, Fortics realized that the ideal plan would be to migrate to a microservices environment, where the architecture is divided into small applications that can be managed independently, without affecting the rest of the system.
Extensive documentation and support for a streamlined migration
Fortics’ team was positively surprised by the migration process. They expected a much more complex job for redesigning the product. With the guidance and consultancy of Somos Nuvem, the company chose the Google Cloud solutions that best suited its needs. Then, it started the migration process based on the available extensive documentation about the tools. In 30 days, the team already had a first version of microservices on Google Cloud.
“Throughout the process, we validated this journey step by step. For us, it was very satisfactory, because with each meeting and chat, and each technical alignment we sought with our pre-sales team, the feedback we had was on how simple and smooth things were going.”
—Paschoal Castro, Account Manager, Somos NuvemThe support offered by the Google Cloud team was also remarkable according to Fortics. “Until we got to know Somos Nuvem, Google was practically 'unreachable' for us, we thought that only large corporations could have access to the service we have today. Google Cloud supports us as if we were their only customer; we were embraced by them,” says Edison Figueira, Head of Innovations at Fortics.
The Executive Director of the company, Francisco Pinheiro Neto, adds that the standard of assistance of Somos Nuvem and Google Cloud has become a benchmark for Fortics itself. "I talk a lot about this standard of service with our Head of HR, and she, in turn, applies this to internal training, because it is a model to be followed.”
Since the first version, the environment is constantly evolving, as new resources, needs or demands arise. Initially, all services were organized in the Google Kubernetes Engine, an application management environment through clusters. Over time, some began to be migrated to App Engine, a serverless platform that also hosts applications, but with automated management.
Dialogflow is used as SZ.chat’s artificial intelligence engine, that is, it is the natural language tool adopted to create conversation interfaces on the platform and provide a more fluid and efficient interaction with users. Pub/Sub is the basis for SZ.chat messaging, allowing messages to be sent in real time with easy management and automatic escalation. And there are other solutions that complement the architecture, such as Filestore, Compute Engine, and artificial intelligence APIs.
A development boost for SZ.chat
The migration to the microservices environment has transformed Fortics’ IT routine. If, in the past, it was necessary to involve the entire team to implement projects in the monolithic environment, today it is possible to organize small squads to work with the applications independently. This generated more productivity, time optimization, and the possibility to quickly align with market demands.
In this way, the team managed to be more efficient to implement a series of resources on the platform, whose environment grows at rates between 25% and 50% per month. “I believe that, in the last six months, the number of features that we implemented in the product would not even have started if the team were still very busy with the monolithic system, which generates a very high development complexity. We would be at least one year behind in technology," reports Figueira.
In comparison with the previous model, the Head of Innovations evaluates that even doubling the capacity of resources with the implementation of advanced redundancy, the cost was still lower.
The SZ.chat infrastructure gained more stability and improved product quality control. In addition, latency control has been fully automated, thus providing better performance and cost predictability.
“It's amazing how the predictability of costs brought by the Google Cloud tool really works. It seems that it can anticipate our growth. Based on the past few months, it provides me with a forecast for the next few months, and it has worked very well so far.”
—Edison Figueira, Head of Innovations, ForticsCloud as an essential product component
The horizon of SZ.chat still has more plans for improvement. “We joke that our solution roadmaps are short term, not long term, because Google Cloud is always innovating, bringing something new. It is a continuous work, and we believe that there are lots of good things to come,” states Somos Nuvem’s Account Manager.
The team is adopting Cloud Storage to distribute recordings and messages within the cloud in an object model. By using BigQuery, Fortics will provide customers with an interface to generate reports and service statistics. Anthos will be used to manage the platform within a multi-cloud. And Google Workspace will be integrated into the product to generate even more convenience, such as, for example, with the automatic registration of a medical appointment in Google Calendar.
There are also two big pieces of news to come. The first is the launch of a new product focused on voice channels, Fortics Voice, which will also be based on the Google Cloud infrastructure. The second is a service solution by RCS, a messaging system that promises to replace SMS. “We already have the MVP within Fortics, we are really just waiting for the RCS to leave the market. We intend to be one of the pioneers of RCS with Google Cloud and Somos Nuvem,” comments Figueira.
For the Fortics team, cloud technology is an essential component of their service solutions and a strategic investment that will continue in the company's next plans.
“I cannot imagine the growth of Fortics, selling and delivering our omnichannel platform that enables smart and convenient service to consumers for our more than 1,700 customers across all states in Brazil and abroad, without a cloud delivery. It would be impossible!”
—Francisco Pinheiro Neto, Executive Director, ForticsTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Fortics
Fortics offers platforms for customer service via WhatsApp, Facebook, Teams, Telegram, Webchat, SMS, email, and voice in an integrated manner. With nearly 100 employees, it has a commercial office in São Paulo, another three offices in Brazil and, soon, a unit in the United States.
About Somos Nuvem
Somos Nuvem is part of the Chilean Tigabytes group and one of the main Premier Google Cloud Partners in Latin America.