Optimove: Empowering brands to be emotionally intelligent with a CDP supported by Google Cloud
About Optimove
Optimove is a relationship marketing hub powering intelligent online interactions. In 2021, it was named Leader in Cross-Channel Campaign Management by Forrester and received a 95% willingness to recommend by clients according to Gartner Peer Insights.
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Google Cloud Premier Partner DoiT International helps customers take full advantage of the cloud.
Optimove is migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud to scale up, free internal teams to focus on innovation, and reinvent data-centric processes for 500+ brands worldwide.
Google Cloud results
- Frees up teams to focus on business value while GKE manages hundreds of microservices to support service delivery
- Supports data-centric processes with managed services that digest data efficiently and are easily connected within one platform
- Makes audits easier and enables faster security checks by unifying data, services, and workloads in a single ecosystem
- Moving from on-premises to GKE, led to execution times improving by 40 to 60%
From 1K event streams per second to infinite scalability
"Google Cloud stood out, for not only providing an impressive range of services that digest data efficiently, but also because it excels at connecting these data services within its platform."
—Ohad Sheory, Chief Software Architect, OptimoveEmotional intelligence enables us to notice and analyze subtle nuances, such as gestures, voice intonation, word choice and facial expressions, so we can adjust our behavior accordingly. From a marketing standpoint, this is a superpower. That’s why software company Optimove focuses on helping brands exhibit emotional intelligence when communicating with their customers online.
Optimove develops relationship marketing software as a service (SaaS) with a customer data platform at its core. It applies algorithmic optimization to autonomously improve multichannel campaigns and customer journeys. In other words, it turns customer data into technology’s equivalent of the gestures, tone, content, and expressions that emotionally intelligent humans perceive. It then translates that data into behavioral patterns, so brands can better understand their customers’ affinities, wants, needs, and hesitations and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly. As a result, brands can accurately deliver the marketing interaction with the highest impact to the right customers, at the right time, through the right channel.
To make this possible, the Israel-based company started with an on-premises infrastructure in 2009 and gradually opened data centers in the U.S. and Europe to serve customers in those areas. But with more than 500 global customers who want to better engage each of their hundreds of thousands of customers online, Optimove decided to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud to better support its growing SaaS platform.
"The ability to provide high-quality solutions at scale was one of the main reasons we moved to the cloud," explains Optimove’s Chief Software Architect, Ohad Sheory. So, when looking for options in 2019, the company was initially attracted to Google Cloud by the range of managed services on offer. "We want to concentrate on our business and products and less on implementing, developing and managing the infrastructure needed to scale and run them," Sheory explains. "Using Google Cloud managed services, we can invest our efforts in developing our own business and not in the services and infrastructure supporting our business."
Another deciding factor was the fact that many of these managed services focus on digesting and handling data. Because Optimove handles large volumes of data 24/7, the company wanted to work with a cloud service provider that also thinks of data as its core business. "Google Cloud stood out, for not only providing an impressive range of services that digest data efficiently but also because it excels at connecting these data services within its platform," Sheory adds.
Modernizing an infrastructure optimized for handling data
Four years after the decision to migrate to Google Cloud, Optimove is well on its way towards transforming internal processes that rely on on-premises solutions. The team’s vision is to gradually transition to cloud-based processes to address application and software gaps and to provide alternative ways of working for all data teams across Optimove. By migrating different environments to Google Cloud, the Optimove team hopes to bridge gaps within the company.
"One of the pain points we’re addressing is the challenge of having duplicate environments from development to production that are similar, not just in terms of the application artifacts, but also from the perspective of the infrastructure and operating system. We’re looking forward to having it all in one environment on Google Cloud," says Amir Gabay, VP of Technical Operations at Optimove.
Additionally, the migration will support Optimove’s aim to balance security and compliance with convenience. As a data-centered company, Optimove does not take security lightly. The company is ISO-certified and working towards achieving SOC certification. But maintaining strict security standards wasn’t easy in its previous setup. "For us, the hardest part with compliance and security relates to our on-premises environments. This is where we need to invest a lot of time and effort in addressing concerns, reducing vulnerabilities and performing audits," says Gabay. "By running everything in one place on Google Cloud, we will make audits easier and have easy-to-use tools to keep our security standards up in less time."
Throughout this journey, when questions arise on the product side, the Optimove team works closely with Google engineers and support services. Google Cloud Premier Partner DoiT International is also on hand for day-to-day support, helping Optimove with the escalation of projects on an as-needed basis.
"We have thousands of services that run each day to support our customers across different regions. Having them managed by GKE, instead of self-managed on Kubernetes, from a stability perspective at this scale, makes all the difference. We’ve noticed improvements in scalability and performance, and have reduced the noise between neighbors."
—Amir Gabay, VP of Technical Operations, OptimoveFreeing up teams with managed services to focus on the core business
So far, one of the most noticeable advantages of the new platform has been the time it frees up for Optimove team members to focus on what they love to do, explains Vadim Waisman, VP R&D at Optimove: "The minutiae of infrastructure management used to take time and resources that we’d rather invest on improving our solutions. So, for my team, it was a priority to leverage Google Cloud managed services that could streamline our operations. And we’re extremely satisfied with what we’ve accomplished so far."
Waisman refers to a new system his team built on Google Cloud that takes care of the heavy-lifting of data ingestion 24/7 for 500+ customers worldwide. This system combines Pub/Sub as a messaging service for event ingestion and delivery, BigQuery as a data warehouse, Dataflow for stream and batch processing and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the managing environment for running containerized applications.
"Previously, we spent time figuring out the correct installation, deployment, scale, monitoring configuration and more with DevOps, before implementing something new or scaling on-premises systems to accommodate more data. Now, DevOps is free to focus on developing our services and tackling any issues in our data streaming system without infrastructure concerns," Waisman says.
Additionally, with more than 130 microservices used for delivering services to each customer, the Optimove team previously needed to self-manage and spin up microservices on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration system to support data flows and performance. With GKE, that’s one less thing the Optimove team needs to worry about. "We have thousands of services that run each day to support our customers across different regions. Having them managed by GKE, instead of self-managed on Kubernetes, from a stability perspective at this scale, makes all the difference. We’ve noticed improvements in scalability and performance, and have reduced the noise between neighbors," Gabay adds. "When we moved our microservices architecture from our on-premises environment to GKE, we saw our execution time improve by 40 to 60%, for example."
"We’re supporting business functions and bigger data loads more efficiently, and have shortened data processing times, which directly affects our customers and business goals. So some advantages the cloud has to offer are already clear, but we’re excited to discover even more cutting-edge technology through our partnership with Google Cloud."
—Vadim Waisman, VP R&D, OptimoveBoosting service performance with scalable event streaming
Meanwhile, the benefits of the new event-streaming system built to support production are being recognized well beyond the technology team behind it. The scalability it enables from a business perspective means the company is better able to onboard new customers quickly because the business is now equipped to handle any load of data.
"Our previous reporting system sometimes struggled with processing 1K events per second and customers reported a slow performance on their sites as a result," says Waisman. "Now, we easily support 10K events per second and can support much more. This is the best achievement of our migration so far from my perspective. It means not only that we can support more customers, but also that we can provide a much better service for each of our customers."
Next, the forward-thinking team aims to keep on experimenting with new technologies to deliver industry-leading CRM journeys, mapped by AI. Waisman adds: "We’re supporting business functions and bigger data loads more efficiently and have shortened data processing times, which directly affects our customers and business goals. So some advantages the cloud has to offer are already clear, but we’re excited to discover even more cutting-edge technology through our partnership with Google Cloud."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Optimove
Optimove is a relationship marketing hub powering intelligent online interactions. In 2021, it was named Leader in Cross-Channel Campaign Management by Forrester and received a 95% willingness to recommend by clients according to Gartner Peer Insights.
About DoiT International
Google Cloud Premier Partner DoiT International helps customers take full advantage of the cloud.