Apollo optimizes its Google Cloud services with SADA

Apollo.io is an engagement acceleration platform that gives sales representatives the ability to dramatically increase their number of quality conversations and opportunities. Users are empowered to do more than just conduct outreach–they learn who to target, how to reach out, and what to say at speed and scale.

Enterprise customers can access Apollo’s database of over 200 million contacts with a built-in, fully customizable Scoring Engine, full sales engagement stack, native Account Playbook builder, and deep analytics suite. By working on a unified platform, customers such as Autodesk and Oracle save hours each day. Apollo allows strategy changes to be instantly scaled across the whole team and provides managers the ability to dig into data at each step of their pipeline to continually find new ways to improve.

“We started this company six years ago to provide a new type of sales process where things are automated, yet triggered on intelligent information from the web. Apollo is far more than a lead generation application; we’re an integrated tool for your entire outbound sales workflow.”

Ray Li | Co-Founder and CTO at Apollo.io

Business challenge

In just six years, Apollo has amassed over 7,000 clients ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Customers utilize Apollo’s platform to improve their outbound sales efforts and to identify and acquire target prospects. “We equalize the playing field and allow smaller companies to compete in a very competitive market where it has increasingly become a winner-take-all scenario,” said Li.

Typical Apollo customers are heavy users of the software and usually link their Salesforce or other CRM accounts and email accounts within Apollo. “Sometimes they bring 20 million records, and that’s just one person,” said Li. “They expect to see that information indexed and the ability to search with filters only available in Apollo. As we increase our customer base, the scale of this issue grows really fast and causes a huge burden on our infrastructure.” 

Solution 

Li and his team of engineers have worked extensively with the four industry-leading cloud providers since the company’s founding. “We chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for a few reasons,” said Li. “GCP offers the best performance for the same cost across all providers. This is especially true for I/O-intensive operations, such as on BigQuery. We cut costs by half when we switched from being hosted on Azure to GCP three years ago. In addition, GCP is flexible and very easy to use for creating a virtual machine (VM) or changing certain configurations.”

Apollo actively uses Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text API to automatically transcribe phone recordings into text and make it easily searchable. The company also uses the Geocoding API, which translates text strings into machine-readable geocoordinates, and Looker for quickly analyzing and finding insights within datasets.

Google Cloud introduced Apollo to SADA two years ago to help with its expanding GCP needs and strategic business growth. Apollo engaged SADA, a three-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, to scale its platform and optimize resources. 

Results

To ensure that Apollo’s services have a reliable presence in its customers’ daily lives, Li’s team revamped its architecture to scale the infrastructure to meet increased demand. By moving from Azure to GCP, Apollo has been able to smoothly support its ever-increasing customer base, scaling from 500  to 7,000 clients, and counting.

“SADA has been very helpful. SADA has established connections and introduced us to resources that allowed us to scale those technologies to cater to more traffic. We’ve also benefited from how SADA structured how we consume Google Cloud services to make them more cost effective. It really has made a difference. SADA also helps our SLA with Google Cloud especially when we need to escalate issues.”

Ray Li | Co-Founder and CTO at Apollo.io

SADA works closely with Apollo to strategize, measure, and provide technical support throughout its entire journey with GCP. SADA goes all in to ensure support issues are responded to in less than 15 minutes on average and technical questions are resolved quickly and efficiently within a few days.  

In summary, SADA and Google Cloud provided Apollo:

• A scalable platform to enable growth from 500 to 7,000+ clients
• 47% cost savings through GCP resource optimization
• Expedited support with initial response time averaging less than 15 minutes
• Quick resolution of technical questions within a few days