Reeport: Helping businesses turn data into insights with a platform powered by Google Cloud
About Reeport
Reeport, a software solution built on Google Cloud, helps businesses optimize their digital marketing investment by helping to compile, clean, analyze, and present their data in easy-to-read reports. Reeport helps its customers turn their data into valuable and actionable business insights that departments across the organization can understand and leverage.
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Contact usReeport leverages Google Cloud managed services to bring a reliable, scalable solution to life that compiles, cleans, analyzes, and transforms data into insightful reports for customers.
Google Cloud results
- Delivers 100% resilient and scalable infrastructure to sustain traffic peaks with no impact to users
- Cuts latency to less than 200ms, from 500ms previously, in order to provide customers with a real-time experience
- Frees developers’ time with managed services, so they can focus on writing code instead of deploying
3x faster deployment cycles
In 2015, a leading digital consultancy in France, Uptilab, was trying to solve a puzzle: whenever it had to determine what to optimize on a customers’ website, consultants spent 80% of their time preparing data for analysis, instead of analyzing that data to find answers. Uptilab looked everywhere for tools to alleviate this hassle for consultants, but couldn’t find a solution that fit its needs and the digital marketing world in which it operates. So, using Google Analytics APIs, the company built its own.
This side project became Reeport, an independent company launched in 2017. Reeport is a software that frees businesses from the hassles of compiling, preparing, and analyzing data so that insights can be seen faster and used to boost their business strategies.
“We believe that every employee within any company should be able to make data-informed decisions,” says Etienne Gautheron, Head of Product and Operations at Reeport. “Today’s digital marketing world is full of promise, because we can get so much information about everything in real time, from how social media posts are performing to what products customers like best and why. Or so we think. But a lot of data is just noise. Having so much of it actually makes it harder for our customers to find the data they really need for making the right decisions at the right time.”
“Google Cloud products are all easy to use, well documented, and their performance is always state of the art. Partnering with Google Cloud to create Reeport was never a question, it was a given.”
—Emile, Developer, ReeportReeport helps customers tackle this challenge by pushing the most relevant information from their multiple data sources (data lakes, applications such as Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Salesforce as well as any CSV or XLS files) into visually compelling reports that are easy to read and interpret. To do this, Reeport compiles the customer’s data, cleans and prepares it for analysis, turns the clean data into reports, and shares these reports in an automated way, so that the customer regularly receives up-to-date insights on how to optimize its online investments and business strategies.
To continually develop the solution, Reeport relies on Google Cloud. “We wanted to build our service as close as possible to the Google Analytics APIs we used from the first day at Uptilab,” says Emile Caron, Lead Developer at Reeport, who was the first developer ever hired to work on the solution. “Google Cloud products are all easy to use, well documented, and their performance is always state of the art. Partnering with Google Cloud to create Reeport was never a question, it was a given,” says Emile.
From proof of concept to fully managed, scalable, and secure
Reeport’s proof of concept was a simpler, miniature version of its current service. It consisted of running scripts that would query Google Analytics APIs then drawing visual presentations from these queries, which could be downloaded from a web application and shared via email. One year later, Uptilab was successfully using the solution internally. “From then on, we started using more Google Cloud products to keep adding features to the solution,” Emile explains.
Reeport uses Compute Engine to scale and support an increasing customer base with virtual machines and the high-performance networking infrastructure of Google Cloud. The company also uses BigQuery to gather customer data into a fully managed and scalable data warehouse, Dataflow and Dataprep to export, clean, and prepare data for analysis in real time, and Memorystore to build application caches and aspects of its user interface.
“All our core applications run on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), because it supports complex workloads in a managed environment,” says Emile. “We also use Cloud SQL because it’s fully managed and automates backups and database management, which are things we developers don’t want to spend time on.”
Google Cloud helps to safeguard the data of Reeport’s customers by automatically encrypting data while in transit and at rest, ensuring that access is only available to authorized users. It also safely removes data when users have marked it as ready to be deleted, which means that data is never stored on the Cloud. “We were already using Google Workspace, so we were familiar with Google security strategies,” says Emile, “and we realized there was no need to build something ourselves when Google Cloud has built-in data protection.”
“Google Cloud Load Balancing is a win-win: it removes one step from our protocol for customers to request a report and reduces our server’s latency time from 500 to 200 milliseconds. This means customers have a real-time feeling when using our application and developers have less code to manage.”
—Emile, Developer, ReeportCustomer-first strategy through a glitch-free, real-time experience
But things weren’t always so smooth. In its early days, when Reeport developers were administering their own servers, they struggled to scale and allocate resources quickly enough when demand increased, like on Monday mornings, when customers most frequently asked for reports about the previous week. “Too many customers using our resources would lead to a degraded experience for some of them. We needed to scale in a way that enabled us to serve more customers simultaneously, without affecting their experience. That’s when we tried GKE and it was perfect for us: easy to use, helps us manage our complex workloads, and allocates our resources more efficiently, according to demand,” says Emile.
Reeport then adopted Cloud Load Balancing to efficiently distribute incoming network traffic across its backend servers and improve latency times. “Google Cloud Load Balancing is a win-win: it removes one step from the protocol to request a report, which means less code for developers to manage. This also reduces our server’s latency time from 500 to 200 milliseconds, which means our application is much faster and doesn’t leave customers waiting around for their reports,” says Emile.
Crucially, Emile explains, Reeport has a few critical queries that the application relies on to launch. Before adopting Cloud Load Balancing, some of these critical queries could fail at random, which meant that customers trying to access Reeport’s server might find a blank page instead of the information they needed. “All these problems stopped when we adopted Cloud Load Balancing,” says Emile. “customers make demands on our servers and they just work, 100% of the time,” he adds.
Reeport now provides an optimal experience, free of glitches or delays, to 40 customers, all large corporate organizations with a wide presence online and offline. “Many of our customers see our partnership with Google Cloud as a stamp for scalability and quality,” says Etienne.
Faster problem-solving and deployment cycles
Being fully immersed in the Google Cloud environment, Reeport’s development team keeps a close eye on new solutions as they become available, Emile shares. “When Cloud Build was launched, we adopted it in place of the third-party SaaS product we were using. Since then, the time between merging new code into our code base and it going live on our servers has gone from half an hour to less than 10 minutes,” he says with a smile. For Reeport’s developers, this improvement means they have more time to write new code that further develops their application, instead of working to deploy it.
“This is crucial for us,” Etienne adds, “because if we can release code three times faster, it means we’re able to release solutions and solve problems as soon as they are pointed out.”
“With the support of Google Cloud, we’re helping our customers use their data to identify what’s working for their business, and where they can improve. Next, we’ll look at machine learning capabilities to be able to tell them about tomorrow.”
—Etienne Gautheron, Head of Product and Operations, ReeportStepping into the future of data insights
Among the things that make Reeport unique is its critical, ingenious way of looking at data: “Many people talk about data as being ‘the new oil.’ We think it’s the new trash. Data is what people who visited your website leave behind. There’s so much of it, that if you don’t clean it up or do some recycling, it just becomes clutter,” says Etienne.
This perspective powers Reeport’s mission of transforming data from clutter to treasure that it can pass on to its customers so that they, in turn, can make more valuable decisions. Moving forward, the company aims to take another step into the future, says Etienne: “With the support of Google Cloud, we’re helping our customers use their data to identify what’s working for their business, and where they can improve. Next, we’ll look at machine learning capabilities to be able to tell them about tomorrow.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Reeport
Reeport, a software solution built on Google Cloud, helps businesses optimize their digital marketing investment by helping to compile, clean, analyze, and present their data in easy-to-read reports. Reeport helps its customers turn their data into valuable and actionable business insights that departments across the organization can understand and leverage.