Pipedrive expands globally through a strategic public cloud migration to AWS, improving efficiency and reach
This leading CRM achieved 95% efficiency on AWS, expanded to eight regions serving 100,000+ customers and set the stage for AI integration.
Industry
Technology, SaaS & ISV
Challenge
Pipedrive needed to scale its infrastructure globally while also improving efficiency to support its rapidly growing customer base.
Outcome Pipedrive’s public cloud migration helps it achieve 95% efficiency across eight global regions through enhanced scalability and optimized costs. Solutions Optimizer+, Public Cloud Platforms Amazon Web Services (AWS)Professional & Managed Services
Rackspace Modern OperationsOur customer
Founded in 2010, Pipedrive is a global, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) designed to support small businesses in achieving sales growth. Headquartered in New York with offices across Europe and the U.S., Pipedrive develops software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools that help sales and marketing teams win more deals and close them faster.
Pipedrive has evolved from a startup into a global company with more than 700 employees, supporting more than 100,000 customers across 150 countries. The platform was originally created by salespeople, built to address their unique needs and challenges has grown into a leading tool that continues to evolve with its users. Pipedrive is headquartered in New York and has offices across Europe and the US. The company is backed by majority holder Vista Equity Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners, Insight Partners, Atomico, and DTCP.
Since 2013, Pipedrive has been working with Rackspace Technology® across various stages of its technology transformation. From its initial public cloud infrastructure needs to expanding into new regions with OpenStack Private Cloud, and now with its latest AWS migration, Rackspace Technology has been a collaborative partner in contributing to Pipedrive's growth and infrastructure.
"Every time we have the Optimizer+ monthly review with Rackspace, we find something new we can act on. The validation is very useful."
Situation
As Pipedrive expanded globally, it recognized the need to evolve its infrastructure to better support its rapidly growing customer base and meet evolving performance demands.
"We undertook a significant project to rearchitect our infrastructure to operate across multiple data centers," said Kristjan Elias, Director of Infrastructure at Pipedrive. "After careful evaluation, we shifted our strategy to smaller, distributed instances across multiple regions. This approach enabled us to scale more efficiently, maintain our infrastructure more effectively and mitigate risk while setting us up for long-term growth."
The original technology strategy enabled Pipedrive to enhance scalability while delivering fast, reliable service to customers in various geographic regions. It also allowed the company to more effectively address compliance and regulatory requirements across multiple jurisdictions.
"As our operations expanded, some components of the infrastructure became more difficult to scale, especially to match the pace of growth," added Vladimir Žulin-Tarelkin, Senior Infrastructure Architect at Pipedrive. Pipedrive needed a solution that would support its cloud-agnostic infrastructure strategy while also providing the flexibility and scalability necessary to meet global demands. At the same time, the company sought to optimize infrastructure costs and increase operational efficiency. Having already used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for several initiatives, Pipedrive leaned on this experience when evaluating options for a broader migration.
"Our account manager and management team are key factors in the success of our relationship with Rackspace. The people in our Rackspace team make this partnership strong and very successful."
Solution
Having trusted Rackspace Technology with its environments for more than a decade, Pipedrive once again tapped into Rackspace expertise for assistance with its migration from private cloud to a multi-region AWS infrastructure. Executed over nine months, the collaboration saw Pipedrive's technical team lead the migration with Rackspace experts providing strategic guidance and financial optimization support.
Pipedrive conducted a pilot by establishing a single AWS region and migrating a subset of customers to test the new environment. This allowed a thorough evaluation of performance and scalability, ensuring the infrastructure could meet future growth demands.
The strategy centered on a phased approach, migrating one data center at a time. The team started with smaller, newer environments, progressively moving to larger, more complex ones. This process allowed Pipedrive to maintain uninterrupted service while optimizing the infrastructure.
Rackspace leveraged its expertise to negotiate an Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) with AWS, securing cost efficiencies for Pipedrive. The Rackspace team implemented its Optimizer+ service and guided Pipedrive through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), maximizing cost savings and utilization of available credits and resources.
Pipedrive's AWS environment now integrates a comprehensive suite of services, including Amazon EC2 for compute resources, Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) for storage, Amazon VPCs for networking, load balancers for traffic management and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for object storage.
The migration established eight AWS regions, strategically located to better serve Pipedrive's 100,000+ global customers. This expanded infrastructure footprint improved performance and enabled Pipedrive to meet varying compliance requirements across jurisdictions.
"We asked the Rackspace team for recommendations on how to manage the migration and associated financials, and we were pleased that everything came together successfully in the end," said Elias. "I would say it was a very big success."
Pipedrive’s successful migration improved efficiency to 95% across eight global regions, enhancing scalability and significantly optimizing costs.
Outcome
Through its partnership with Rackspace Technology, Pipedrive has enhanced its global infrastructure, optimized cloud operations and positioned itself for future innovation. The migration has led to significant enhancements in the company's ability to serve its growing customer base efficiently and effectively.
Pipedrive's AWS efficiency rating increased from 82% in August 2023 to 95% by September 2024, with further projections of reaching 99%. This boost in efficiency, coupled with strategic investments in cloud resources, demonstrates Pipedrive’s ability to scale operations intelligently and cost-effectively.
By implementing compute savings plans through the Optimizer+ service, Pipedrive achieved significant monthly cost savings. "Every time we have the monthly Optimizer+ review with Rackspace, we find something new we can act on,” said Elias. "The validation is very useful."
The AWS infrastructure now offers Pipedrive greater elasticity and simplified maintenance processes. "We’ve focused on the elasticity of the infrastructure and the ability to maintain it in a smaller and simpler way,” Elias said. “The Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), along with autoscaling groups, brings us tremendous benefits. With EKS, we can replace our advanced maintenance pipelines with a managed solution, which I think is the biggest shift in terms of efficiency gained from the AWS platform. This improved scalability lets us adapt quickly to evolving customer needs and market conditions."
As Pipedrive's global reach optimizes its growth and helps it maintain high-performance standards, the collaborative partnership is helping to pave the way for the company’s future innovation. Pipedrive is now poised to explore and integrate AI technologies into its infrastructure. The company is considering options like training and offering its own internal Large Language Models (LLMs) on the AWS platform and potentially leveraging services such as Amazon Bedrock to enhance its CRM offerings further.
"Our account manager and management team are key factors in the success of our relationship with Rackspace," said Žulin-Tarelkin. "The people in our Rackspace team make this partnership strong and very successful."
Pipedrive’s relationship with Rackspace Technology, which began in 2013, remains a critical component of its technology strategy. With Rackspace providing commercial support and technical expertise, Pipedrive can stay focused on its core business of developing innovative CRM solutions. This partnership has streamlined Pipedrive's current IT operations while positioning the company for continued success in the highly competitive SaaS CRM market.
About Rackspace Technology
Rackspace Technology is the multicloud solutions expert. We combine our expertise with the world’s leading technologies — across applications, data and security — to deliver end-to-end solutions. We have a proven record of advising customers based on their business challenges, designing solutions that scale, building and managing those solutions, and optimising returns into the future.
As a global, multicloud technology services pioneer, we deliver innovative cloud capabilities to help customers build new revenue streams, increase efficiency and create incredible experiences. Recognised as a best place to work, year after year, by Fortune, Forbes, Great Places to Work and Glassdoor, we attract and develop world-class talent to deliver the best expertise to our customers. Everything we do is underpinned by an obsession with our customers’ success — our Fanatical Experience™ — so they can work faster, smarter and stay ahead of what’s next.
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