LumApps: Making work more rewarding with a unified, cohesive digital workspace
About LumApps
LumApps aligns the modern enterprise workforce through better communication, engagement, organization, and work. The company’s leading intranet and employee experience platform intelligently connect people, information, and applications to deepen business relationships and grow institutional knowledge and productivity. LumApps is counted on by over four million users from Airbus to Zendesk.
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Contact usLumApps uses Google Cloud to make work easier for employees by integrating the full range of their digital apps into a single, simplified employee experience platform.
Google Cloud results
- Scales to millions of users with minimal DevOps overhead
- Sparks innovation, shipping new updates every six weeks with GKE
- Provides customers with the highest standards of security and stability
Achieves service levels of 99.97% uptime over six years
At a time when so many of us are working remotely, it is more important than ever for companies to find ways to connect with their employees. Social media and digital productivity suites can help, but workers can often feel overwhelmed or alienated by multiple log-ins and a plethora of different platforms.
LumApps has a different vision. The company, based in France, helps large enterprises make life easier for their workers by integrating the world’s most popular digital platforms and services into a single, customized digital workplace. Employees log in, via the web or mobile app, to a single employee experience platform and can seamlessly access whatever tools they need to without disruption. With LumApps, companies can give their employees the very best digital tools on the market without sacrificing company cohesion. “We want to make it easy for all employees to connect, find, consume, and produce valuable information,” says Elie Melois, CTO at LumApps. “To do that we have built our own enterprise content management system and added a lot of integrations within that ecosystem. We make people feel like they belong to a company and have a purpose. We’re building the future of work by focusing on the employee experience rather than on the IT solutions.”
“The priority for any startup should be market fit. We chose to go with Google Cloud from the start because it took care of the infrastructure management, leaving us free to focus all our energies on our product.”
—Elie Melois, CTO, LumAppsIt’s a strategy that has paid off handsomely. Today, LumApps has more than 400 clients across the world, including household names such as John Lewis, The Economist, Just Eat, Schnuck Markets, and Google. LumApps has achieved this growth in a remarkably short time, having only launched in 2015. From the very start, the company built its platform to be scalable using Google Cloud.
“The priority for any startup should be market fit,” says Melois. “We chose to go with Google Cloud from the start because it took care of the infrastructure management, leaving us free to focus all our energies on our product.”
“On other data platforms, we’d have to invest huge amounts into manpower and resources. But with BigQuery, we can query huge amounts of data with incredibly quick response times and only pay for what we use. It’s very cost effective. I think it’s unique on the market”
—Elie Melois, CTO, LumAppsFocusing resources on what counts
When LumApps first launched in 2015, the core of its platform was App Engine. The serverless platform comes with minimal management overheads, which allowed the company to build, test, and release its intranet product and onboard its first customer, with more than 100,000 users, in just four months. “To be able to release a product that’s just a few months old and scale to that many users without having any infrastructure management to worry about was amazing for us,” says Elie. “It led to really positive customer feedback, which in turn led to more business, and we grew from there.”
By 2019, LumApps had grown to include some of the biggest enterprises in the world, including several Fortune 500 companies. While it could comfortably handle millions of users, LumApps was approaching the limits of its existing infrastructure solution. In order to scale to the next tier of operations, the company migrated to a microservices based architecture, centred around Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Switching to GKE meant that LumApps could scale more efficiently and take greater control of its infrastructure, while still being able to use managed services. “When you have millions of users, scaling up from that becomes complicated,” says Melois. “You need more observability, greater control of the deployment process, and more efficiency. That’s what we got with GKE.”
For its data operations, LumApps uses Cloud SQL to manage its PostgreSQL databases, along with BigQuery for its data lake and analytics solution. The ease with which data can be shared and analyzed in BigQuery means that the company can find valuable insights quickly in everything from internal performance logs to business intelligence data.
“On other data platforms, we’d have to invest huge amounts into manpower and resources,” says Melois. “But with BigQuery, we can query huge amounts of data with incredibly quick response times and only pay for what we use. It’s very cost effective. I think it’s unique on the market.”
Even as it grows, LumApps is constantly looking for ways to innovate and improve its performance. The tools available with Google Cloud AI have helped. In particular, the Translation API and Cloud Natural Language have eased the transition to companies who work in different languages.
“For many companies, reliability is a challenge, especially at scale, but we just don’t have to worry about it. With Google Cloud our service level agreement has been 99.97%, which amounts to about two hours of downtime per year over the past six years.”
—Elie Melois, CTO, LumAppsGrowth, innovation, and peace of mind with Google Cloud
In just six years, LumApps has gone from a minimum viable product to a mature, feature-rich platform with more than 4 million users working at some of the biggest enterprises in the world. Even at this level, LumApps has been able to minimize its infrastructure costs. “We only pay for what we use, so we've kept our infrastructure spend aligned to top industry standards,” explains Melois. “That means we can funnel our resources to where they are most needed.”
Money isn’t the only thing LumApps has saved with Google Cloud. Without a large DevOps burden, the company’s developers can focus their energies on perfecting the platform and innovating new features, which helps to keep LumApps one step ahead of the competition. Developers currently ship updates every six weeks, ensuring that customers benefit from a mature, smooth service that integrates the latest apps. But all the features in the world would be worthless if customers couldn’t trust LumApps to keep the platform secure and stable. Dealing with large enterprises, data security is of paramount importance especially across multiple regions. With Google Cloud, LumApps can enjoy the highest standards of security and has greatly simplified the certification process for ISO 27001.
As well as security standards, LumApps can also take advantage of the global presence of Google Cloud and its high-performance network. LumApps has built a service that customers not only enjoy using, but they can trust that it will stay live even under the most challenging circumstances.
“For many companies, reliability is a challenge, especially at scale, but we just don’t have to worry about it,” says Melois. “With Google Cloud our service level agreement has been 99.97%, which amounts to about two hours of downtime per year over the past six years.”
LumApps isn’t slowing down. With its new microservices-based architecture, the company is poised to scale up to tens of millions of users. But growth is not the only thing on the horizon. With a 99% renewal rate, LumApps has learned that innovation is key to keeping its clients happy, so Elie Melois and his team are experimenting with some of the latest tools in the Google Cloud range.
“Our next big push will be into AI and machine learning,” he explains. “We’re always striving to make content more relevant and personalized for our customers, and Google Cloud will play a big part in that.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About LumApps
LumApps aligns the modern enterprise workforce through better communication, engagement, organization, and work. The company’s leading intranet and employee experience platform intelligently connect people, information, and applications to deepen business relationships and grow institutional knowledge and productivity. LumApps is counted on by over four million users from Airbus to Zendesk.