Reduced development cycles from 3–6 weeks to 3–6 days, an 80% to 90% improvement
Cloud Run cut scaling time from 45 minutes to less than ten seconds
Cloud SQL read replicas made analytical queries 50% to 70% faster with zero production impact
Used Security Command Center to reduce risky configurations by 30% to 50% and achieved high stability, cutting monthly incidents from three to five to one or less
Estimated 20% to 30% savings in infrastructure costs through automatic scaling
Macal used Google Cloud to transform its 40-year-old auction business into an AI-first platform, enabling regional expansion.
Macal used Google Cloud to transform its 40-year-old auction business into an AI-first platform, enabling regional expansion.
Unlocking digital scalability for a
40-year-old auction house
Auction house Macal has always been an early adopter of technology, becoming the first in Chile with a website and the first to transmit live auctions online. Built on 40 years of operation, Macal has transformed into an AI-first tech company specializing in connecting buyers and sellers of real estate and vehicles through its digital platform to enable regional scaling. This legacy of innovation continued with "The Nomad Project," Macal’s plan to become an AI-first technology company that would help it achieve its ambitious regional expansion plan into markets like Colombia. This vision, however, was hindered by reliance on highly manual operational processes, such as onboarding new properties to its website, and self-managed Virtual Machines.
Gathering and verifying public property data took approximately two weeks per listing, which limited the company’s ability to scale. Furthermore, Macal reclaimed 80 to 100 hours every month by slashing its maintenance and infrastructure load by 40% to 60%, allowing the team to pivot from manual tasks to innovation. The reliance on Virtual Machines also resulted in slow analytical queries that often impacted the performance of the production database. “Our focus is for technology to allow the company to scale without depending on processes that are purely manual, as these limit the amount of business we can raise,” explains Catalina Salgado, sub-manager of digital transformation at Macal. The company’s goal was to reduce this task to minutes and cut the overall development cycle from 3–6 weeks to just 3–6 days—an 80% to 90% improvement in speed. But to do this, it needed a cloud platform with a modern, serverless architecture and integrated AI tools.
Macal chose Google Cloud for its developer experience and quality support. The team, working alongside implementation partner uCloud, valued the intuitive architecture and the simplification provided by serverless tools like Cloud Run. This partnership approach was key to accelerating the modernization of Macal’s core auction platform. Crucially, the decision to leverage Cloud SQL with read replicas addressed the performance bottleneck, ensuring analytical queries could run 50% to 70% faster with zero performance impact on the production database. “The level of support Google Cloud has given us has truly been a facilitating entity in this entire process,” says Salgado. This robust technical foundation, ready for AI integration through Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and low-latency auctions with AlloyDB, made Macal’s expansion vision achievable.
AI automation and serverless architecture
propel Macal’s regional expansion
Macal developed its internal “MaIA” platform on Google Cloud to overcome its scalability challenges. The solution centers on a modern microservices architecture powered primarily by Cloud Run, the containerized environment that serves as the core runtime for their applications. Migrating away from self-managed Virtual Machines to this platform dramatically accelerated the modernization of its core auction services, reducing the deployment time for new solutions from three to six weeks down to a single day. This architectural shift also solved critical stability issues, reducing monthly incidents from three to five to zero or one and boosting system availability. This streamlined workflow allows the team to focus on business logic rather than infrastructure management.
For me, this whole experience has been about understanding Google as a facilitating entity. The level of support they gave us has truly enabled this entire process.
Catalina Salgado
Sub-manager of Digital Transformation, Macal
The team has also reduced time spent on their property ingestion process. Where Macal's operations team previously had to review lengthy legal documents, the new system handles it automatically. With Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform agents can extract information, such as property identification numbers and legal encumbrances, slashing the process time to just 30 minutes. Automating this process allows the company to add countless new properties instantly, helping them manage more listings at scale.
The scalable, serverless architecture provides the foundational agility for Macal’s regional expansion into markets like Colombia, allowing the company to meet its internal objective of achieving a 30% reduction in manual processes and enabling estimated infrastructure cost savings of 20% to 30% through automatic scaling, such as property validation. Furthermore, Cloud Run autoscaling reduced the time needed to scale resources from approximately 45 minutes to under ten seconds. From a security standpoint, Macal utilized Security Command Center to gain full asset visibility, which helped reduce risky configurations by 30% to 50% and eliminated reliance on unsupported legacy servers.
From a critical data and transactions standpoint, the MaIA platform relies on managed database services like Cloud SQL, which serves as the primary transactional database for the new platform. By implementing read replicas within Cloud SQL, analytical queries became 50% to 70% faster with zero performance impact on the production database. For its data and analytics foundation, Macal leverages BigQuery for data analysis, providing the business intelligence needed to interpret auction data. The team is positioned for future high-performance needs through a planned migration to AlloyDB, which will provide the high-speed transactions and low latency essential for live auctions. This comprehensive data strategy, alongside the platform’s readiness for advanced data science initiatives using Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, will continue to help secure Macal’s position as an AI-first technology leader, enabling the company to accelerate its growth into new markets.
Google Cloud architecture is very intuitive, which greatly speeds up the entire programming and deployment process.
Gabriel Cabrera
Head of Infrastructure, Macal
Built on 40 years of history as a Chilean auction house, Macal has transformed into an AI-first tech company specializing in real estate and vehicles to enable regional scaling.
Industries: Real Estate, Technology
Location: Chile
Products: Google Cloud, AlloyDB, BigQuery, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Security Command Center, Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage
About Google Cloud partner – uCloud
uCloud is a Google Cloud Partner that specializes in modern cloud architecture and implementation services.
