Sessions, a product reuniting all productivity tools
Sessions is a mass-market SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) that reinvents the way professionals and companies collaborate online. Launched in 2021, Sessions offers a complete solution pack for managing and conducting business meetings. Moreover, with Sessions, these meetings can develop their own agenda, consisting on many smaller divided subjects. Each of these subjects then allows the rendering of a different type of content: from the classic video conference to presentations, forms or tools like Miro, Canva, Figma, YouTube or Sli.do, up until conclusions and follow-up.
Currently, the company has a team of 31 people, while the actual Sessions product serves a number of 8,000 active users. UiPath is one of the big companies that use Sessions, utilizing the product to support webinars addressed to their customers.
A mass-market product, designed on a global scale
By developing a mass-market product dedicated to global use, the company sought a scalable solution that would keep the pace with ever-evolving services and that can work with the skills the team already had.
The decision to go with Google Cloud Platform was quite a simple one. Our team had previous experience on the platform. Thus, in order to benefit from a high speed of infrastructure development, we decided to go with this option. Of course, for a mass-market product on a global scale, an on-premise solution was not an option.
Google solutions are a comfortable and universally supported choice, doubled by the experience of many engineers and architects, according to Sessions’ COO. At the same them, the previous experience with Google for some of the team’s fundamental members weighed heavily on deciding the cloud provider.
The scaling possibilities offered by Google also influenced our decision. As our product is meant to work for mass-market, we needed a provider that would offer stability both depending on the location and the traffic.
To complete all the needs for the service it provides, Sessions also uses the Chime service provided by Amazon Web Services for the video conferencing infrastructure.
What GCP services does a product like Sessions use?
In GKE we run all the workloads of the solution (APIs, workers, jobs, etc.). Cloud SQL is used as the main data store for the application. Cloud Memorystore (Redis) is used as a distributed key-value pair storage, while with the help of PubSub we implement competitive features and, as a backend, for the job schedule system.
Sessions, a client converted from Google Workspace to Google Cloud Platform
The company has relied, ever since its beginnngs, on Google Workspace solutions like Google Docs, Sheets or Slides being not only used internally, but also outsourced throughout the Sessions product.
With an easy-to-manage console and secure services guaranteed by Google, the company is storing and processing approximately 80% of its documents in the cloud.
Our trust in GCP as an infrastructure provider, also on its security, is also reflected across using Google Workspace and trusting in the security guaranteed for our emails and documents. We do not have an exact number for this, but I tend to say that over 80% of the company's documents are stored and processed in the cloud.
FOTC, a Google partner aligned with Sessions’ needs
One of the benefits of working in the cloud is the 24/7 availability of the product, a need that is also sought upon the provider. Although previously collaborating with another Google partner, Sessions decided to make the transition to working with FOTC to better overlap work intervals, the availability of services and support.
The decision to work with FOTC came from the need to have as much overlap of working hours as possible with our Google partner. The previous partner was located in the United States and it was difficult for us to find suitable time slots for both parties to discuss or resolve any issues that arose.
Why does Sessions recommend working with a Google partner?
Cost control, easy to do payments, special discounts and prompt communication are some of the benefits of working with FOTC.
We wanted to have better control over the costs, both by being able to pay by bank transfer at a set time and by reducing them with the help of discounts offered by Google partners. Another important aspect for us was having a strong communication channel for those situations where we would need guidance or specialized help.
Strengthening a business relationship with a multi-business partner – through both Workspace and GCP – is the key to a healthy and long-lasting business relationship that benefits all parties involved, concludes Sessions’ COO.