The enterprise cloud for a
personalized customer journey
Why PBM AG relies on a cloud provider from its home country
PBM AG is a specialized SaaS provider that has launched a platform for marketing automation and cross-channel personalization of any media format. PBM AG offers a solution that can be used in all industries, while the focus to date has been on close cooperation with companies from the finance and insurance sector. A certified and GDPR-compliant cloud solution is a central component of the Cologne-based SaaS provider’s business model.
A success story
Overview
The Cologne-based SaaS provider PBM has been on the market since 2017 and has established itself as a specialist for cross-channel personalization in the field of marketing communication.
Industry
Software development SaaS
Employees
14
Customers
Signal Iduna, Zurich Versicherung, SDK, VPV, Sparkasse, Envivas u. and many more.
gridscale products in use
– Enterprise Cloud
– Infrastructure as a Service
– Managed Kubernetes
– S3-Storage
– RESTful API
The goal
The Cologne-based IT company was looking for a suitable solution for the extremely sensitive and sensitive data in the banking and insurance sector. It was looking for a private cloud in which the data would be hosted exclusively in ISO-certified German data centers. Also important for the Cologne-based company: a partnership-based collaboration in the further development of its own products and a highly scalable infrastructure that can be adapted to the peak loads of customer campaigns.
Challenges
The hyperscalers also process data from German customers in other European countries. For PBM AG, however, it was crucial that the sensitive data of customers from the insurance industry is stored and processed exclusively in Germany. In addition, a cloud infrastructure had to be found that was highly scalable, as the personalization of content for a large number of channels requires high load peaks to be absorbed.
The solution
PBM AG found what it was looking for at home: the enterprise cloud from the Cologne-based company gridscale offers an interface that PBM AG can use to control its Kubernetes clusters for individual customer projects fully automatically, separately from each other and dynamically scale all the required resources. German data protection standards and data centers in Frankfurt impress security-sensitive end customers from the financial and insurance sectors.
Key Results
Highest data protection compliance
Fully automated managed Kubernetes
Personal partnership at eye level
The goals we set back then have been confirmed and, thanks to the data protection certificates and the German data centers, we have successfully gained a foothold in our current focus market. Thanks to gridscale, we were able to customize our services as a SaaS provider and further expand our technological expertise .
Ralf Pispers, CEO of PBM AG
The customer
Ralf Pispers came up with the idea for the Personal Business Machine in 2016: as head of a digital agency with a focus on video productions, he worked with his own camera teams for large insurance clients and produced image videos in the branches on site. After the shoots, he often received feedback that teams had grown or other things had changed in the offices, meaning that the footage for the videos had to be reshot after just a few weeks.
In order to reduce costs, Ralf Pispers came up with the idea of developing standard video formats that could be personalized at any time without having to reshoot. As this idea was also very well received by the customer, Pispers and his team transferred the idea of personalizing videos to all media formats, including websites, landing pages, image formats, etc. – personalization “from the machine”, so to speak. This was the starting signal for the founding of PBM AG as an SaaS provider in 2018.
Marketing content from the machine – the products
With its own in-house development team, Pispers has created a platform over the years that is now available on the market in three different versions as SaaS products: the Media Engine for playing out personalized content, the Campaign Platform for creating customer journeys in sales and the TrustITBox for secure data exchange.
Areas of use and application scenarios
The SaaS solutions can be used as stand-alone software or integrated into market-leading marketing automation and customer relationship management systems such as Hubspot, Salesforce and others at the end customer via interfaces. The Personal Business Machine is primarily used by technology-oriented agencies that implement marketing automation campaigns for end customers in the insurance and financial sectors.
These campaigns include, for example, mailings for customers with information on contract changes or discount campaigns for new insurance offers, or explanatory videos presenting a new insurance product. In marketing, these materials are used to acquire new customer business, but sales staff can also benefit from them in order to respond quickly to the needs of their existing customers and inform them promptly about changes to their contracts.
Initial situation and objectives
PBM’s decision to opt for a cloud infrastructure from a German provider was made in 2017. Prior to this, the SaaS provider had already used several different cloud solutions over the years and gained experience with American hyperscalers: “Back then, we built our platform with AWS and were supported by customer projects from IBM, among others. In terms of functionality, we were satisfied with these cloud solutions, but data protection issues arose more and more frequently over time,” recalls Ralf Pispers.
Data protection problems with hyperscalers
The fact that American hyperscalers do not comply with the GDPR when it comes to data protection became a major challenge for PBM – especially when it came to playing out personalized content for the financial and insurance sectors.
“End customers in this sector are legally obliged to carry out very strict checks, e.g. the so-called ‘order processing contract’ (AVV). They therefore need to know exactly where the data centers where their data is stored and processed are located. With the hyperscalers in use, we as a SaaS provider could not be 100% sure that, for example, backups and mirroring of data were not being sent to data centers in other European countries. As a result, we often had to hold follow-up discussions of around 8 hours with potential customers from this industry during the review process. This was simply too inefficient for our business case and no longer sustainable,” explains Dustin Linchey, Head of Product Operations at PBM AG.
The goal: a German cloud
PBM’s goal was therefore to find a scalable German cloud solution that could grow with the requirements of the SaaS provider and meet the highest GDPR standards with ISO-certified German data centers. Through personal contacts, Managing Director Ralf Pispers pricked up his ears when he learned that there was a then still young German cloud company in the Cologne neighborhood that met exactly these requirements. After a personal presentation in which gridscale was able to demonstrate GDPR compliance and data centers in Frankfurt, the decision was quickly made in favour of the cloud specialist.
Realization
Since the launch of gridscale’s cloud solution in 2017, PBM’s platform has continued to evolve and grow alongside gridscale’s cloud infrastructure. PBM is currently operating the latest version of its product (PBM 4.0) in the gridscale Enterprise Cloud. All data from PBM customer projects is stored in the high-security data centers Frankfurt 1 and 2. In addition, some front-end applications run on dedicated servers, meaning that a total of around 20 product instances of the Personal Business Machine are managed in the gridscale cloud.
Data protection at the highest level
PBM can rely on ISO certificates 27001, 27017 and 27018 to ensure data protection compliance for the various customer projects in the financial sector. They not only serve as proof of the integrity of the data and system security of the gridscale Enterprise Cloud for data-sensitive customers from the insurance sector, but also ensure monitoring and guidelines for the protection of personal data in the cloud.
Customer management with Kubernetes clusters
As the various projects in the cloud are largely managed by agency partners, PBM AG decided to rely on Kubernetes clusters. The management of customer data in these container clusters offers the advantage of setting up a strictly separate instance of the Personal Business Machine platform for each individual agency partner, so that there is no mixing of data at IT infrastructure level and the GDPR is strictly adhered to at all times.
Additional resources flexibly scalable
The SaaS platform (consisting of Media Engine, Campaign Platform and TrustITBox) thus runs via several network nodes in the cloud. This means that each user only has access to their own account and their own Kubernetes cluster. Agency customers benefit in particular from the automatic scaling of infrastructure resources via the autoscaling function.
“In personalization campaigns, content has to be adapted for many different media and sent to a very large target group of recipients at the same time. This means we need higher IaaS resources – but only at a certain point in time. With the autoscaling function of gridscale’s Kubernetes clusters, server capacities are automatically ramped up when we need them and ramped down when we no longer need them. We remain GDPR-compliant at all times,” explains Tobias Klein, Head of Development / Technical Project Manager PBM.
Cooperation at eye level
The close cooperation with the developers and IT experts from gridscale is a major plus point from the point of view of the Head of Development at PBM: “The autoscaling function for Kubernetes clusters was not part of the solution at the time. But when we discussed our specific automation requirements with the gridscale team, they were very quickly implemented and tested for us. This type of partnership-based cooperation helps us to implement customer requirements quickly and efficiently,” Klein continues.
Smooth automation thanks to interfaces (API)
Tobias Klein’s DevOps team set up the infrastructure resources in the gridscale cloud completely automatically via a specially developed interface.
The Cloud Panel, gridscale’s intuitive operating and management interface, only uses PBM to generate reports on the consumption of cloud resources and to create new users.
In addition, the entire Kubernetes cluster is operationally connected via its own API, meaning that no additional instances need to be set up or controlled manually.
“We believe that everything that can be automated in the area of DevOps should also be automated with reasonable effort in order to eliminate the source of human error as far as possible,” says Klein.
Outlook
In future, PBM plans to implement further features of its cloud solution in order to further optimize the existing structure.
For example, there are also plans to connect a monitoring feature via the interface.
Summary
By using the gridscale cloud, PBM AG was able to tap into a new customer sector and provide them with personalized content for marketing and sales campaigns from the cloud in compliance with GDPR. The highly scalable infrastructure of the gridscale enterprise cloud solution helps the provider to handle customer projects quickly and efficiently while remaining completely flexible in terms of adding resources at peak times.
“The goals we set back then have been confirmed and, thanks to the data protection certificates and the German data centers, we have successfully gained a foothold in our current focus market.
Thanks to gridscale, we were able to customize our services as an SaaS provider and further expand our technological expertise,” explains Ralf Pispers, CEO of PBM AG.
For the provider, the feeling of partnership-based cooperation and consulting at eye level prevails. “gridscale gives us the feeling that we are really important as a customer. Not only have we grown together technologically, but we have also faced all the challenges in the cloud together. We hope that we can continue to grow together with gridscale and bring more customers into the cloud,” summarizes Pispers.
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