Google Cloud Results

• Improves application performance by 8x to 12x; customers can create increasingly complex optimized driving routes in single-digit seconds
• Improves customer satisfaction via increased reliability and greater application performance
• Focuses on adding value to customers by improving software and algorithms, not infrastructure management
• Saves 5x in infrastructure costs

In 2009, Dan Khasis needed to rent an apartment. His search had him driving around the greater New York City area in unfamiliar areas, scattershot-style, often ending up where he started. The frustrating experience led the serial entrepreneur to launch Route4Me, a smartphone navigation app to help consumers create driving routes optimized for multiple stops.

Soon, business users recognized Route4Me’s value and requested enhancements specifically for them. While route optimization apps for big businesses already existed, they were almost exclusively offline desktop programs that were expensive to purchase, deploy, and get trained on. Recognizing the opportunity, Route4Me developed an affordable route optimization solution across various devices, such as smartphones, smartwatches, and telematics devices. The software was tailored to logistics-intensive businesses such as last-mile delivery services and business units conducting field sales, field service, and field marketing functions.

As Route4Me grew its user base, it became clear that its infrastructure of rented, dedicated servers from various providers wasn’t sustainable. “The hardware costs seemed low, but there were many risks and hidden costs,” says Dan Khasis, Co-founder and CEO at Route4Me. For example, “Multi-zone disaster recovery, high availability, automated failover, and on-demand surging of many nodes was simply impossible,“ he adds.

Because under the hood Route4Me’s routing optimization platform requires complex computations, the company needed a globally scalable infrastructure capable of delivering low latency and high throughput. Route4Me also needed to stay competitive by developing and delivering new services as quickly and efficiently as possible.

For these and other reasons, Route4Me moved 100% into the cloud. “Like many entrepreneurial software companies, we test all the latest technologies we can find before upgrading. Typically we go with the fastest technology, with a strong bias towards open source and open standards,” Khasis says. Based on extensive testing, Route4Me selected Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Along with the scalability, flexibility, reliability, and low-cost structure of GCP, Route4Me had already migrated its entire platform to containerized microservices, which Khasis says “are extremely stable and reliable” on Google Kubernetes Engine. While Route4Me has proprietary routing and route optimization engines, it uses Google Maps for high-precision geocoding and as the frontend.

With GCP, Route4Me has reduced its IT infrastructure costs while delivering faster route optimizations and more reliable service to customers. Because of GCP, the company is also planning to add services that will deliver the fastest possible routing simulations and calculations to customers at a price that Khasis says is “impossible without a mature cloud-based platform like GCP.”

Unexpected savings, pleasant surprises

The migration to GCP and Kubernetes Engine required Route4Me to revamp its Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and convert millions of lines of code into containerized microservices running on Kubernetes Engine. With more than 150 microservices and thousands of add-on modules and features offered on the Route4Me platform, the migration took several months. But the transition, which began in May 2017 and concluded toward year’s end, went smoothly. “Thanks to the reliability and open source portability of Google Kubernetes Engine, Route4Me experienced one-tenth of the problems that we’ve had when onboarding to other cloud providers,” says Khasis.

Halfway into the migration, Route4Me engineers discovered an unexpected cost savings. The ability to run preemptible virtual machine (VM) instances with Kubernetes Engine resulted in a 90% savings in infrastructure costs, according to Khasis.

The engineering team was also pleasantly surprised by the improved intra-system latency and performance between the Google network and those of third-party systems and other data centers that Route4Me connects to. Overall latency dropped from 8x to 12x. “Where it used to take 8 to 14 seconds to plan a complicated route, now it takes as little as 2 seconds,” Khasis says. Route4Me is also running most of its transactional and operational data through Google BigQuery for a variety of business use cases, including complex machine learning tasks such as geospatial analytics, geospatial pattern detection, and synthetic density.

Scaling while delivering great performance

Route4Me algorithms take into account such data as driving distance, driving time, who’s driving, the day of the week, the vehicle being used, weather conditions, and dozens of other attributes. “All those scenarios and data have to be run in near real time,” Khasis explains. The Route4Me system must access multiple internal and external databases, aggregate all the information in parallel, and deliver it using a high-speed infrastructure platform.

“Our core services and algorithms work much faster on a Google architecture, bringing the total time to solve a complex route problem down to single-digit seconds.” “Many of those steps are resource-intensive,” Khasis adds. “With Kubernetes Engine clusters, we can do much more, scaling up and down as needed, and still deliver great performance to customers around the world.”

Because of its scale, Route4Me built its own automation system for marketing, support, and communications with its customers. “Since we moved our proprietary marketing automation system to GCP, we began delivering our omni-channel marketing communications more reliably, and the correct message reached customers faster and at just the right moment,” says Khasis. “That’s translated to happier customers and increased revenue.”

Customer satisfaction has increased, too, because Route4Me’s users experience far fewer slowdowns than before due to the reliability of GCP. The reliability also means the company spends less time worrying about certain clusters or servers going down for extended periods of time. “We have zero sysadmins, which was the Achilles heel of some of my previous startups,” says Khasis. “So we can focus on software development rather than infrastructure management.”

In order to scale as needed and develop new features, Khasis had expected the company would need to hire more SysAdmin, DevOps, and SecOps staff. “But once we migrated to the modern GCP environment, we didn’t have to make those hires. We saved a lot of money by not having to hire, train, and manage more people,” explains Khasis.

Flexible GCP pricing, in which customers only pay for what they use, has saved Route4Me money on its IT infrastructure. “Preemptible server pricing on GCP is so aggressive,” Khasis says. “If servers are automatically shut off for a certain time period, we don’t pay for them for that period. And if servers are on for a certain amount of time, we get an automatic 30% discount. We’re saving money on the platform with fixed and dynamic workloads.”

Per-second billing with GCP also helps Route4Me cut costs. “If it only takes 25 seconds to do something, we only pay for those 25 seconds,” Khasis says. For the same 25 seconds, other cloud providers might charge for 10 minutes usage or even an hour.”

Road map for the future

In the coming year, Route4Me plans to offer additional add-ons as part of its self-service marketplace, providing customers with transparent pricing on highly complex route optimizations. The service will be extremely valuable to heavy users. For instance, if an organization has to visit 50,000 locations by a certain time, it might wonder if it needs to add 20 people to make that happen and how much it’s going to cost. “Because we’re on GCP, our customer can run a variety of complicated routing scenarios to see which one is the most efficient in seconds instead of minutes,” says Khasis. “As far as I know, none of our competitors can offer that kind of service, giving us an edge as well as a new revenue stream.”

Going forward, Route4Me will begin migrating a huge portion of its core routing optimization platform to Google Google Cloud Spanner. “We want to take further advantage of Cloud Spanner, which comes closest to the CAP theorem and permits us to operate an infinitely scalable and nearly indestructible platform,” Khasis says.

As one example, Route4Me receives telematics data, such as GPS coordinates, from Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smartphones and vehicles, and performs complex algorithmic analysis running on Cloud Spanner. This provides real-time return on investment (ROI) information, so customers can see how much money they’re saving by using Route4Me routing optimization services.

“In order to help as many logistics-intensive businesses as possible, we intend to migrate our proprietary mapping, routing, and route optimization services to Cloud Spanner to take advantage of its extreme reliability and redundancy, and the multi-availability zones of Google Cloud Platform,” says Khasis.

Route4Me also plans to leverage Google machine learning technology, in part to make its routing solution available for use in autonomous and drone vehicles, as well as decentralized edge computing deployments. In addition, Google security and encryption technology will help the company expand its offerings to the heavily regulated medical industry.

Over 60 Route4Me team members use G Suite for almost everything. ”We’re interested in using everything possible with G Suite. We get inspiration from G Suite, too. A lot of thinking and effort went into improving G Suite, and we use that as inspiration to improve own products.”

If you took one look at the title of this blog and thought, “just show me how, because I already know a million reasons why I’m stressed about billing things” then check out the interactive tutorial right here.

For everyone else, read on, because we’ll walk through some common sense tips, and a few step-by-step tutorials for all things billing related. If you’ve ever wished you could sit down with someone from Google Cloud, and walk through your bill, the console, and your options — you’re in the right place! Consider this Cloud Billing 101 – an intro level course that’ll get you started on the right foot.

6 simple tips to manage your Google Cloud billing accounts:

1. Get to know your billing statement and console: Knowledge is power, after all. Take a tour of the billing console so you can better understand your options, along with what’s included in your monthly bill and the different components.
2. Set up authorized users, alerts and budgets: Make sure anyone who needs to have access to payment settings is authorized. Allocate budgets for projects, and get notifications when your usage or spending exceeds a certain amount so you can take action as needed.
3. Use cost-saving tools: We’ve got  a range of tools and services to help you save money, like Committed Use Discounts, and even Recommenders for actionable, AI-powered intelligent recommendations around your cost trends and product usage.
4. Optimize your resources: Use the Google Cloud Resource Manager to see how your resources are being used and identify areas for optimization, temporarily suspend, or even shut down unused projects. 
5. Review your billing history with reporting and data visualization: Regularly check your billing history with reports to help track your spending, identify any trends or patterns, and even anticipate future costs. You can even export your data to BigQuery for detailed analysis, or use a tool like Google Data Studio to visualize your data.
6. Use the pricing calculator: Estimate your monthly costs and make informed decisions with the Google Cloud pricing calculator. It can help you get a ballpark figure for your usage, and determine if your use case fits within cost-free parameters.

I hope these common sense pointers and tutorials empower you to effectively manage your Google Cloud billing and stay on top of your spending. Get started right now by managing your billing methods and payment settings in this 5-minute tutorial, and then take a tour of the billing console to get familiar with your setup.

Enterprises are increasingly seeking out technologies that help them create unique experiences for customers with speed and at scale. At the same time, customers want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data, particularly when it comes to business-critical applications.

That’s why I’m thrilled that Sprinklr, the unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, has partnered with Google Cloud to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and grow awareness among our joint customers. Sprinklr will work closely with our global salesforce, benefitting from our deep relationships with enterprises that have chosen to build on Google Cloud. 

Akin to Google Cloud’s mission to accelerate every organization’s ability to digitally transform their business through data-powered innovation, Sprinklr’s primary objective is to empower the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier by listening, learning, and taking action through insights. With this strategic partnership now in place, Sprinklr and Google Cloud will go-to-market together with the end-customer as our sole focus.

Traditionally, brands have adopted point solutions to manage segments of the customer journey. In isolation, these may work — but they rarely work collaboratively, even when vendors build “Frankenstacks” of disconnected products. These solutions can’t deliver a 360° view of the customer, and often reinforce departmental silos. All of which creates point-solution chaos.

Sprinklr’s approach is fundamentally different and is the way out of the aforementioned point-solution chaos. As the first platform purpose-built for unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) and trusted by the enterprise, Sprinklr’s industry-leading AI and powerful Care, Marketing, Research, and Engagement solutions enable the world’s top brands to learn about their customers, understand the marketplace, and reach, engage, and serve customers on all channels to drive business growth. 

Sprinklr was built from the ground up as a platform-first solution, designed to evolve and grow with the rapid expansion of digital channels and applications. The results? Faster innovation. Stronger performance. And a future-proof strategy for customer engagement on an enterprise scale.

“Sprinklr works with large, global companies that want flexibility when deciding where to manage their enterprise data and consider our platform a business-critical application,” said Doug Balut, Senior Vice President of Global Alliances, Sprinklr. “Giving our customers the opportunity to manage Sprinklr on Google Cloud empowers them to create engaging customer experiences while maintaining the high security, scalability, and performance they need to run their business.”

To learn more about this exciting partnership and the challenges we jointly solve for customers, check out the recent conversation between Google Cloud’s VP of Marketing, Sarah Kennedy, and Sprinklr’s Chief Experience Officer, Grad Conn. Or read the press release on the partnership.