Syft Analytics: Serving fast financial insights with high-performance processors
About Syft Analytics
Syft Analytics serves financial reports and analytics to over 50,000 businesses in more than 50 countries around the world. The winner of the Customer Experience Award at the International Accounting Awards 2023, Syft Analytics is also investing in South Africa's future by training high school and university students in the practical skills they need to make a career in business.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact usGrowing rapidly, Syft Analytics migrated to Google Cloud to power faster, more complex financial reporting, and work with a cloud platform that could scale as fast as the business grew.
Google Cloud results
- Improves compute-per-dollar by 50% with Google Kubernetes Platform Autopilot
- Doubles the speed of generating extensive financial reports with powerful Google Cloud processors
- Saves developers two hours a week of debugging time with built-in logging
- Halves deployment times, enabling faster release of updates and new features
Scales from South African startup to global player
Small and medium enterprises make up 98.5% of all businesses in South Africa, and contribute 39% of the country's GDP. However, with most small businesses failing in the first year due to poor financial planning, it is essential that business owners and managers remain fully informed of their businesses' financial health, to give them the best chance of survival.
Arming companies with financial insights was exactly what Vangelis Kyriazis, Eleftherios Kyriazis, Duran Hamer, and Matt Stephanou set out to achieve when they founded Syft Analytics in 2016. Now running on Google Cloud, Syft Analytics' interactive and collaborative financial reporting platform enables businesses and accounting firms alike to generate clear and visually attractive financial reports into their business performance.
"The fact that Syft Analytics' reports are visual means they allow people to look at something and instantly understand it," explains Kyriazis, Co-Founder and CEO, Syft Analytics. "Visuals also help businesses see things like trend and seasonality in their data. And because our reports always go down to transaction level, they provide answers to questions that businesses may not even have thought of."
At the same time as helping businesses, Syft Analytics is also investing in the future of South African entrepreneurship by training high school and university students to use digital tools and accounting software. Syft Analytics wants to help young graduates start their careers armed with the real-world skills to make an immediate impact at their business or accounting firm.
With its $1 billion investment in Africa's digital transformation, Google, too, is investing in the future of Africa's young and ambitious workforce. As a participant in the Google for Startups program, Syft Analytics' own growth from ambitious startup to global player is proof that investment in Africa's future is already having an impact across the world.
In search of a powerful platform that could scale as Syft Analytics grew
Originally running on a third-party cloud platform, Syft Analytics' rapid growth, and its ambitions to scale up the business globally, hit a ceiling when the platform was unable to keep pace with Syft Analytics' functionality. When customers found they were unable to download longer and more complex reports, Syft Analytics realized that it had outgrown its cloud provider.
After consulting the Google for Startups team, Syft Analytics ran a proof of concept using App Engine to see if it could help to improve download speeds and solve the problem of occasional outages that Syft Analytics had been experiencing with its previous platform.
"We ran a testing phase, and once we realized how much faster App Engine was, we migrated everything to Google Cloud. It was a really smooth process, and easy to get our team using it because App Engine is so intuitive, with good defaults, making the barrier to using it incredibly low."
—Matt Stephanou, Co-founder and CTO, Syft"We ran a testing phase," explains Stephanou, Co-founder and CTO, Syft Analytics. "And once we realized how much faster App Engine was, we migrated everything to Google Cloud. It was a really smooth process, and easy to get our team using it because App Engine is so intuitive, with good defaults, making the barrier to using it incredibly low."
With the platform up and running on App Engine, the Syft Analytics team noticed a significant improvement in the stability of their system, with customers enjoying far faster download speeds, even on more complex reports. Outages, too, became a thing of the past.
"With App Engine, the system ran 24/7. It never went down," says Stephanou. "If ever there was a memory overload, it simply restarted itself, without any interruption to the service. Overall, the performance of our platform was greatly improved."
A new leap in performance with high-spec processing power
As Syft Analytics continued to grow, it soon found it required more processing power. Having become more familiar with Google Cloud solutions, and with the inspiration that came from a close working relationship with the local Google Cloud team, Syft Analytics turned to Google Kubernetes Engine Autopilot. This gave Syft Analytics more flexibility with its architecture, allowing it to use powerful processors when it needed them, and more cost-effective ones when it didn't.
"By selectively using high-spec processors with Google Kubernetes Engine to increase our system performance, we almost doubled the speed of producing reports, meaning we could generate twice as many in the same period of time."
—Matt Stephanou, Co-founder and CTO, Syft"By selectively using high-spec processors with Google Kubernetes Engine to increase our system performance, we almost doubled the speed of producing reports, meaning we could generate twice as many in the same period of time," Stephanou explains. "And by using the more cost-effective processors for other parts of our system, we were able to improve our compute per dollar by as much as 50%, allowing us to support twice as many businesses for the same spend."
A faster, more efficient operation with Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Cloud has enabled the Syft Analytics team to be more efficient with its developer time too. With Cloud Logging dashboards built in to Google Kubernetes Engine, Syft Analytics has a constant view of what is happening within its system. In the event of any problems, the developer team is easily able to trace and debug any issues as they arise.
"The built-in logging has helped us tremendously," says Stephanou. "Having that view of what has caused an issue means we are able to debug twice as quickly. Our developers have saved around two hours a week in debugging time, which is time they can now spend building value for the business and developing features for our customers."
Deployments are also faster with Google Kubernetes Engine, with deployment times previously in excess of 30 minutes now halved, meaning Syft Analytics has a faster release cycle, enabling the business to roll out site updates and new features more frequently than before.
From local startup to global scaleup with Google Cloud
This ability to roll out more complex new features is also down to the scalability of Google Kubernetes Engine. Previously, limited compute power meant Syft Analytics was restricted in either the complexity of reports that it could generate, or the speed they took. Now, Syft Analytics is able to easily scale out the number of servers it uses and produce more complex reports in parallel across multiple processors.
"Take a national franchise, with 250 stores, wanting to combine millions of transactions per month into a single report," explains Kyriazis. "Previously it would have taken a customer five minutes to download that report, but now that we can quickly scale up resources, we can serve that report in under 30 seconds. As a user experience, it's excellent."
"Google Cloud has helped us to scale up our business very quickly. As we look to the future, we're confident it's going to enable us to develop a lot more products for our customers and, as our user base increases, to continue to scale up our business globally."
—Matt Stephanou, Co-founder and CTO, SyftSyft Analytics has also been able to create custom-hosted domains for its clients, thanks to the provisioning of domains with Google Kubernetes Engine. This means that Syft Analytics is now able to offer its customers white-label sites, where accountants can host all of Syft Analytics' reporting for their business customers, using their own corporate branding.
For Syft Analytics, this is yet another way that the company is helping businesses to grow by taking control of their financial data, both in South Africa, and, increasingly, worldwide. As Syft Analytics continues to implement more Google Cloud solutions to improve its offering, such as Document AI to import data more easily from physical documents, Stephanou is convinced that the company's growth from South African startup to global business has been made significantly easier with Google Cloud.
"Google Cloud has helped us to scale up our business very quickly," says Stephanou. "As we look to the future, we're confident it's going to enable us to develop a lot more products for our customers and, as our user base increases, to continue to scale up our business globally."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Syft Analytics
Syft Analytics serves financial reports and analytics to over 50,000 businesses in more than 50 countries around the world. The winner of the Customer Experience Award at the International Accounting Awards 2023, Syft Analytics is also investing in South Africa's future by training high school and university students in the practical skills they need to make a career in business.