The client considers the adoption of Google Cloud Platform as a strategic decision than a platform decision, since it helped them consolidate all their infrastructures on one platform
Kamal Puri, Google Business Unit, Persistent
The client is a leading provider of technology solutions for their clients in the travel and hospitality space. With thousands of travelers world over, the client needed to constantly innovate and reinvent their products to drive business benefits to their client portfolios.
On the road to innovate on three parallel fronts:
- The client was evaluating different solutions and platforms to develop new Analytics and Machine Learning powered products. They wanted a highly scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution that would benefit their clients in managing their data and leveraging accurate business insights. They partnered with Persistent to help them improve their client service. Persistent planned a hackathon event at the client location to provide a practical and hands-on Google Cloud Platform expertise to their developers
- Slowly, the conversation around exploring Google Cloud Platform for their new product gained momentum as their tech leaders saw the cost and performance benefits with GCP. The benefits of Google Cloud Platform percolated to the Infrastructure and the Product Engineering teams
- The client was earlier using a competing cloud provider’s service for their infrastructure. They had data centers across the globe to host their business applications. However, performance issues were mounting. Meanwhile, the Product Engineering team started exploring GKE and two other Cloud providers for their projects’ managed services requirements. But, the service providers except Google Kubernetes Engine could not offer them efficient and high-performing managed services
For these three client challenges and requirements, Persistent suggested Google as a single, one-stop platform. The all-encompassing Google Cloud Platform solution would cover:
- Analytics and Machine Learning for innovation,
- Google Kubernetes Engine for product engineering, and
- Infrastructure for application and database hosting
The big move to GCP
Persistent provided PoCs for all the three solution requirements. Persistent performed data modelling, designed a custom ML model, developed Google Kubernetes Engine with the base technology as .NET core, and developed a product on the infrastructure front. It was followed by performance, capability, and latency testing.
Over a period of three months, the client’s infrastructure and Kubernetes engine were moved to Google Cloud Platform. At the face of compatibility issues, agile reengineering was performed to port and run all the services on GCP.
The business benefits
The solutions and offerings developed with Google Cloud Platform products and APIs emerged as a clear winner in terms of performance and usability across different product and service teams of the client. The benefits include –
- Data: Now all the data can be consolidated from all the owners from different locations. Latency in terms of accessing or consuming data has been reduced significantly
- Performance: There has been a drastic improvement in the performance of the solutions and the infrastructure, especially in case of Kubernetes
- Cost: The cost has been reduced by 15-18% than what it was earlier
