Solution Partner effy Scales Business with Freshworks
In 2014, Senthil Kumar Muthamizhan and I, both Ruby on Rails enthusiasts, met through a mutual friend to build products for global customers. In a span of three years, after building over a dozen projects together, we decided to establish a brand to target enterprises.
Today, effy comprises a great team of developers having years of expertise in engineering products ensuring customer satisfaction.
Challenges effy is Solving
Today, on an average, an organization powered by SaaS uses 34 applications, while 38% of companies are running almost entirely on SaaS. The rich complexity that this multi-app SaaS environment brings, requires managing users and data across SaaS apps dynamically and efficiently.
A few of the problems users report in these environments include data redundancy, data integrity, data inconsistency, user context, cohesion between systems, customizability, and data migration (Source: Bettercloud).
At effy, we discovered this opportunity to build System Integrations to solve these problems — real time data synchronization, one-way and two-way syncs, events handling, and complex business logic, all stitched into a single middleware under a secure layer fully deployed, maintained, managed, and upgraded by our engineers.
Partnering with Freshworks — Exceeding Expectations
Our partnership with Freshworks materialized in August 2017, when we approached Freshworks because of the phenomenal growth and access to global customers. Frankly, we did not expect to make much out of this partnership and aimed to close a few lean integration projects.
Interestingly enough, we procured advanced projects that required a deeper understanding of SaaS and the Freshworks platform and API ecosystem.
As a result of this partnership, we had a 3X increase in revenue. We receive a high volume of integration requests which compensates for short-term projects. This continuous supply of projects from the Freshworks Marketplace has worked out very well for us.
Building Solutions
Here are some of the key projects that we worked on:
- Shopify & Freshdesk — Caters to the entire workflow beginning with a customer discovering a product on a Shopify store, placing orders and converting the orders to Freshdesk tickets, and finally fulfilling the orders using Freshdesk.
- Okta & OneLogin Provisioning — Periodically synchronizes requester/employee information from Okta or OneLogin to Freshservice via the SCIM methodology.
- HP & Freshservice — Syncs HP assets on Freshservice with the latest warranty information obtained for newly added assets and refreshes existing ones.
- Mambu & Freshsales — Regularly imports customer information and transactions as leads/customers and deals in Freshsales for a microfinance business in Nigeria.
App Development
The FDK CLI makes it easy even for early beginners to create business-centric apps efficiently. Combined with well-written documentation, you get everything you need to build and submit your brand new app.
Serverless is our tool of choice as most of our projects are complex and need to scale on-demand. Some of our projects leverage Scheduled Events to periodically push data to downstream systems, while some use Product Events to execute event-driven operations based on requesters and tickets. In most cases, we leverage App Setup Events to perform operations on our middleware when installing and uninstalling an app.
The support we receive from the Freshworks team both during the requirements gathering phase and during development has been tremendously helpful. Developer Advocates are available around the clock to help us with quick questions and issues if any.
What Next!
The Freshworks Developer platform, with a built-in customer base from the Freshworks Products themselves, gave effy the right opportunity to productize its knowledge and scale its business. With consistent growth in app revenue and projects with bigger ticket sizes, including various mid-market and enterprise customers, we believe that the best is yet to come and we are looking forward to it.
