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Customer Story

Simplifying Financial Flows with Cloud-Native App Offers Complete Solution for Businesses

ProActive moves its IT infrastructure to the cloud as it aims to simplify business finances with entirely cloud-based app Spend Cloud

Related services
Cloud

Industry
Business and IT

Company
Binx | Part of Xebia

Currently employing over 11,000 people, Norwegian software provider and IT consultancy Visma formed in 1996 and is headquartered in Oslo. Its subsidiary, ProActive, is the creator of cloud-based expense manager Spend Cloud available in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. The app uses a single environment to monitor expenditure flows and manage business expenses in one place, providing a detailed overview of spending from purchase to pay. The environment comprises five modules including Cash and Pass, Invoicing, Expense Purchase, and Contract Management. Spend Cloud uses real-time analytics to help businesses spend money wisely.

Why
Future-proof services and products
What
Migrate existing platform entirely onto Google Cloud Platform
How
Launch Spend Cloud using Kubernetes and infrastructure-as-code provisioning

Challenging the Status Quo

Operating on the Google Cloud platform lends development cycles agility and the ability to build and learn quickly. Indeed, a cloud environment provides much-needed automation and simplifies workflows. For ProActive, deploying cloud-native solutions would allow more time spent on product development, getting rid of overly complicated processes. ProActive wanted to ensure its product would be future-proof and Xebia for its integrated and detailed approach to projects. Dirk Bonenkamp, ProActive’s CTO explained: “With Xebia, we knew we had the right people to help us gain the functionality we needed to succeed.”

 

Develop a Dynamic Plan

ProActive is a company specializing in simplifying the financial side of the business through technology. To do so well requires a certain amount of flexibility, security, and scalability. Xebia agreed that migrating to the cloud was the only way ProActive could fully unlock its potential and data so customers could gain more from its Spend Cloud platform. Executing the migration would require multiple stages, followed by infrastructure management and auto-scaling the platform. Xebia led the way for ProActive’s migration to the Google Cloud Platform.

“The migration of our products from SaaS to cloud-native is a major project of strategic importance for ProActive.The migration was executed efficiently and best practices around security, cost efficiency, and performance optimization were taken into account.”
Visma ProActive
Dirk Bonenkamp CTO

Finding Efficiency in the Cloud

ProActive’s cloud migration provided a clear path towards higher impact and more insight for its customers. The process was technically challenging, starting with containerization of different services using Kubernetes, followed by migrating data storage to CloudSQL and CloudMemoryStore/Redis, and then managing repeated deployments via Gitlab. The final step was creating infrastructure-as-code provisioning via Terraform. Implementing a DevOps way of operating with continuous delivery allowed for inconsistencies to be found and managed with issues caught before deployment. Applications are now tested early on, allowing ProActive more time on product development and features. Additionally, DevOps brought a human touch, as participation and ownership among teams have increased. Processes are clearly broken down resulting in lower costs and higher efficiency.

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