Symphony: Transforming enterprise collaboration

About Symphony

Symphony is a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that connects markets, organizations, and individuals securely. Providing enterprises with end-to-end encryption and an innovative app ecosystem, Symphony has grown quickly across some of the world’s largest firms.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, France, and Japan

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Symphony provides enterprises that choose public cloud with a secure collaboration platform, matched with a high-performance cloud-hosting infrastructure from Google Cloud.

Google Cloud results

  • Symphony’s leading-edge, secure cloud-based collaboration platform for enterprises is matched with a high-performance cloud-hosting platform from Google Cloud
  • Improves performance via a global footprint, enabling better customer experiences for the cloud-hosted application
  • Enables dynamic new workflows leveraging the suite of Google machine learning products

Improving collaboration for enterprises

In financial and professional services, secure enterprise collaboration is essential, as is the need to continually innovate. Employees want the freedom to share documents and content, conduct online meetings, and share their screens with trusted colleagues, both in the office and on the go. However, legacy messaging platforms lack enterprise-class security, open APIs, and integration with chat bots and other business applications. Symphony offers an integrated and more flexible alternative, with built-in end-to-end encryption for securing messages and media.

Backed by some of the biggest names on Wall Street—Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, BlackRock, Citadel, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Natixis, Nomura, Société Générale, UBS, and Wells Fargo—Symphony is already a popular choice for financial services, insurance, and professional services enterprises. Symphony currently serves more than 310,000 licensed users across over 290 companies with an open and growing app ecosystem.

“Running Symphony on Google Cloud allows us to expand our global footprint and provide greater performance to our growing customer base.”

David Gurlé, Founder and CEO, Symphony

Symphony’s mission is to increase workflow productivity with an easy-to-use collaboration platform that also facilitates global regulatory compliance. To maintain strong security, Symphony protects data with end-to-end-encryption, and architects internal and cross-company communications in a compliant manner. Symphony gives enterprise customers the option to use cloud infrastructure, helping the world’s largest financial institutions migrate mission-critical content and business operations to the cloud. After starting with a single cloud provider, Symphony shifted to a multi-cloud strategy that includes Google Cloud.

“Running Symphony on Google Cloud allows us to expand our global footprint and provide greater performance to our growing customer base,” says David Gurlé, Founder and CEO of Symphony.

Improving security and compliance

Symphony’s entire ecosystem—content owners, enterprise customers, and application developers—depends on end-to-end security. Symphony uniquely brings together end-to-end encryption and the attractive economics of cloud computing while facilitating compliance with regulations.

Google Cloud offers regions and zones across the world, enabling rapid collaboration for Symphony’s cross-region enterprise customers as well as the ability to satisfy data sovereignty requirements.

“Google Cloud really shines in our discussions with enterprises and regulators because of Google’s robust global network and the vast choice it gives us in terms of regions and zones where data resides,” says Derek DiPerna, Head of Sales at Symphony. “That helps us move the discussion forward—and from there, it’s all about innovation.”

Helping R&D move faster

Symphony runs its app on Google Compute Engine, using memory caching to enhance performance for users. To improve reliability and reduce costs, Symphony uses managed services in Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Pub/Sub for real-time messaging and Google Cloud Bigtable for low-latency, high-throughput databases (see Figure 1).

GCP Symphony Architecture
Figure 1

Using messaging and database services on Google Cloud gives Symphony performance and scalability right out of the box, helping its R&D organization move faster. Moving from a custom software service to Google Cloud Pub/Sub also helped lower the cost of that component by 25%.

“By using Google Cloud APIs to give our enterprise customers a richer and easier way to train machine learning models and build bots, we’re helping them be more innovative in how they collaborate.”

Derek DiPerna, Head of Sales, Symphony

A springboard for change

Symphony’s partnership with Google goes far beyond cloud hosting—it also offers new functionality faster by allowing enterprises to apply the latest machine learning techniques using simple APIs. For example, enterprises can use Google Cloud Translation to automatically facilitate business chat in different languages and Google Cloud Natural Language to automatically schedule calendar events. Symphony also provides open APIs that enterprises use for the creation of chat bots to enhance and automate their scheduling and trading workflows, leveraging Google Dialogflow to build conversational interfaces.

“By using Google Cloud APIs to give our enterprise customers a richer and easier way to train machine learning models and build bots, we’re helping them be more innovative in how they collaborate,” says Derek.

“The relationship and support we get from Google is a huge differentiator over the competition. With Google, we have a partner that is as committed to long-term innovation as we are.”

Derek DiPerna, Head of Sales, Symphony

Partnering for continuous improvement

Symphony’s enterprise customers can be confident that Google’s continuous investment in its infrastructure will enable future benefits. Symphony has regular conversations with Google engineers about how to optimize and enhance its service, and the two companies are working together to define best practices for more secure, cloud-based collaboration and content sharing for enterprises in the world’s largest industries.

“The relationship and support we get from Google is a huge differentiator over the competition,” says Derek. “With Google, we have a partner that is as committed to long-term innovation as we are.”

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

Contact us

About Symphony

Symphony is a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that connects markets, organizations, and individuals securely. Providing enterprises with end-to-end encryption and an innovative app ecosystem, Symphony has grown quickly across some of the world’s largest firms.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sweden, France, and Japan