SimpliField scales-up with Google Cloud
SimpliField launched in Paris, France in 2013 and is a fully integrated mobile platform for retail operations, internal communications and advanced performance analytics. The company now has more than 70 employees, based in France and North America, and over 130 customers, including Revlon, Alliance HealthCare and LVMH.
After years of running on several hypervisors and virtual machines which were unscalable and required a lot of maintenance, SimpliField moved to Google Cloud in 2020.
Olivier Mayot, CTO, SimpliField said: “When you are growing as fast as SimpliField is, you need a cloud provider that can scale super fast. Google Cloud has an interesting offering and we could see it had a wide range of practical services, such as BigQuery, which we knew would be useful in the future.”
SimpliField chose to migrate its tech infrastructure to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), which took approximately six months to complete. “Once everything was settled on GKE, however, adopting Compute Engine was much more straightforward,” added Mayot.
GKE allows SimpliField to deploy, manage, automate, and scale containerised applications and works with Compute Engine to create and deploy virtual machines at scale.
Mayot said: “We don’t have a problem with scaling anymore. With Google Cloud, we can deploy a new large customer with staff based in shops and warehouses dotted all around the world by just pushing a button, and they’re ready to go in a matter of minutes. If they ask for hosting in Asia, Europe, or America, we can deploy a new cluster wherever they want without any limitations.”
The SimpliField app allows its customers to keep track of stock, resourcing, finances, KPIs, and marketing campaigns, as well as providing a data analytics SaaS performance platform to help senior management make informed decisions on business strategy
“Before we came along, our customers relied on emails and spreadsheets for company communication. And when you have a national, or even international, network of shops, warehouses, and offices, with most of the staff on the shop floor having limited access to a computer, such an unreliable reporting system resulted in expensive mistakes,” continued Mayot.
Since moving to Google Cloud, SimpliField has been able to scale up its operations while maintaining a slimmed-down workforce as, without Google Cloud solutions, Mayot said that SimpliField would have had to employ two more staff members to manage all the processes that GKE and Compute Engine handle.
