RD Rises to the Scalability Challenge by Quadrupling its Customers with a Google Cloud Solution

About Resultados Digitais (RD)

RESULTADOS DIGITAIS (RD) is a leading company in the development of software (SaaS) designed to help small and medium-sized companies grow, with a 3-digit year-over-year growth and over 12,000 customers.

Industries: Technology
Location: Brazil

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Resultados Digitais (RD) is a leading company in the development of software (SaaS) designed to help small and medium-sized companies grow. By quadrupling its customer base in 2 years, RD realized that Google Cloud technologies could address their growing demand for scalability while helping them get deeper insight into customer profile and behavior with real-time segmentation.

Google Cloud results

RESULTADOS DIGITAIS (RD) resorted to Google Cloud and its tools as a way to solve scalability issues after having quadrupled its customer base in two years

Cloud Spanner – the highly consistent, distributed database created by Google – combines the benefits of relational databases with the horizontal scalability of NoSQL databases, which is why it was chosen as the platform to integrate and consolidate previously scattered data in the new cloud environment

The development cycle of new applications and the time spent in managing environments were considerably reduced

RD's solution managed to democratize access to this type of technology for small and medium-sized companies

RESULTADOS DIGITAIS (RD) is a leading company in the development of software (SaaS) designed to help small and medium-sized companies grow. Its main tool is RD Station Marketing, which operates under the Growth Machine theory, a procedure that organizes and executes marketing and sales strategies for RD's customers.

Under the motto: "The company that transforms the way you think of Digital Marketing," RD itself is an example of this logic with its own results, by having quadrupled the number of service subscribers in two years to its current 12,000 customers. Meanwhile, the company had been "struggling" with the scale restrictions of several computing services. This factor forced RD to rethink its IT infrastructure and scalability. The solution was to migrate to the cloud with Google Cloud.

With the dynamics and innovation inherent in any startup and a significant customer base, RD expects new leaps of growth based on Google Cloud's infrastructure and services. The company acquired Plug CRM and expects to retain new customers from its offices in Mexico and Colombia, as well as in Brazil with the support of an ecosystem of 1,500 associated agencies and 70 integration partners. "We already have customers in over 20 countries and even some of them were using Google Translate to use our tools and communicate with us," says Marcelo Uemura, Platform Engineering Manager at Resultados Digitais.

"In practice, by quadrupling the number of customers in two years we have created even more insight and our infrastructure issues became four times greater as well,"

Marcelo Uemura, Platform Engineering Manager at Resultados Digitais.

Upon addressing the computer restrictions and the combination of marketing and CRM – whose success depends on the creation of insight from data generated by customers' customers – scalability became a huge obstacle. "In practice, by quadrupling the number of customers in two years we have created even more insight and our infrastructure issues became four times greater as well," explains Uemura.

The key problem: the database, the company's core. "We added other databases but using different sources to represent the same information brought about problems. So we searched for something that would allow us to scale and consolidate our database," he recalls. In March 2017, with the arrival of Cloud Spanner – as the relational NewSQL database distributed by Google is known, – RD analyzed it and realized it was an important element to solve the database issue.

Freeing Themselves from Problems

Another factor for the company to choose Google Cloud as provider and partner was its product and service portfolio.

"What Google does in terms of data scalability is exactly what we need, something extremely sophisticated and dynamic. We noticed that Google Cloud had resolved many of the issues we were facing. And we confirmed this observation in practice,"

Marcelo Uemura, Platform Engineering Manager at Resultados Digitais.

The CDP (Customer Data Platform) solution project – a combination of the data of RD customers' customers – is now entirely created on Cloud Spanner, which does not involve only data but also customer behavior and movement, such as real-time interactions and conversions. "It's an 'engine' with everything related to the customer. We know, for example, if a person has any decision-making power in their place of work, as well their searches to target customized marketing actions, such as offerings," he explains.

The greatest task in this migration is not developing a new CDP solution but rather adapting the existing application architecture to the new service. Thus, RD has not yet "turned" everything out and is adapting its applications to the new data platform. Its customers' event history is on Cloud Spanner, the databases are synchronized and only some other features are still being gradually migrated.

In this process, Uemura highlights the integration of Google Cloud services, such as Autoscaling. And also the chance to understand, through Google Cloud's billing report tool, the expenses made by platform or project. "It seems trivial but it makes a huge difference when it comes to translating where we invest and how we are going to collect from our customers," he says.

Choosing Google Cloud is also rooted in the investment in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence made by the company. "It's strategic as these are the fundamental pieces of our business' puzzle. We moved from a mobile-first to an AI-first approach. We are using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in many of our projects, which would have been unthinkable before given our focus on SMEs,” he adds.

Now and in the Future

Now, October 2018, is a moment for consolidating the platform on Cloud Spanner in order to ensure the expected scalability. One of the results is that RD manages to add or remove cluster machines with great ease within the Google Cloud. And, because of its closeness to its partner, the company can learn about Google Cloud’s series of new tools and services.

Thus, the architecture absorbs the new tools and becomes more mature, especially by reducing complexity, concentrating all applications – previously distributed across different cloud providers – only in Google Cloud. The authentication and authorization of our applications and APIs for the cloud will soon be completed.

When drawing a comparison between platforms, Uemura pinpoints certain advantages of Cloud, not so much in terms of the time it takes to develop new apps but more in terms of the lesser effort RD's technical team has to make in the administration of the new environment and its ensuing infrastructure standardization. Actions that would normally take hours or days are performed in a dynamic fashion.

In 2019, for example, RD expects to move a large part of its event processing to an architecture that combines Apache Beam and Dataflow, as a solution to the obstacles found in the analysis of heavier data. "We are betting our entire data infrastructure, which is our core, on Google’s platform," he concludes.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Resultados Digitais (RD)

RESULTADOS DIGITAIS (RD) is a leading company in the development of software (SaaS) designed to help small and medium-sized companies grow, with a 3-digit year-over-year growth and over 12,000 customers.

Industries: Technology
Location: Brazil