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September 09, 2024

Syndigo accelerates digital commerce for its customers by more than 40% with Azure

Syndigo needed a scalable digital platform to help it manage and syndicate data, simplify infrastructure, and become the foundation for its cloud-native technology stack. The company had experience with Microsoft 365 and knew customers trusted Azure.

Syndigo now uses multiple Azure products, like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), to meet its business needs. It relies on Microsoft Defender for Cloud to protect its environment, including back-end systems running on Linux-based operating systems.

Syndigo has accelerated digital commerce for customers by more than 40% and expanded its customer base since tapping into the Azure feature set and shortening development time. Using cost optimization resources in the Azure portal, it continues to adopt new capabilities such as Azure AI Services.

Syndigo

Syndigo, a leading content management, distribution, and syndication company, helps businesses make their data more accurate and actionable to safely share it with all their trading partners, enhancing digital supply chain efficiency and e-commerce sales. Syndigo chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud platform for improved scalability and security and a global footprint. The company takes advantage of cost optimization tools in Azure alongside Azure AI Services to enhance its data insights as it continues to grow.

When we tell leading brands, manufacturers, and retailers that we’re 100% software as a service and 100& built on Microsoft, that builds confidence and trust.

Dominic Citino, Senior Vice President, Alliances, Syndigo

Meeting the demands of the digital supply chain

Data unlocked. Potential unleashed. That core philosophy has led Syndigo, a leading content management, distribution, and syndication company, to become a trusted solutions provider and advisor to more than 14,000 enterprises around the world. Organizations call Syndigo when they want to unlock maximum value from their data as they build high-quality datasets through its platform and business rules. “Data drives business forward when it is secure, accurate, and enabled for syndication with trading partners,” says Dominic Citino, Senior Vice President, Alliances, at Syndigo. “This creates a trusted connection and two-way communication with trading partners, which really unleashes the potential of the data in their organization. We help our customers build a really strong data foundation and put their data in motion with all their trading partners.”

 

Syndigo’s comprehensive software stack includes master data management (MDM) and product information management (PIM) solutions, along with product experience management (PXM) solutions that empower e-commerce sellers through data syndication of product information and marketing assets. The solutions take all the data points that factor into how a product sells—how to describe it, how to present it, how customers can discover more information about it, and how to maximize customer engagement—and give marketers, merchandisers, planners, and allocators an easy way to manage that information consistently in a single platform. They get detailed data insights and digital shelf analytics, such as whether rich content embedded on a retailer’s website is influencing buying decisions and which products are winning at the buy box. Using these insights together with Syndigo’s platform, companies can design a better commerce experience for their customers and retail partners. In return, retailers can generate better ROI and revenue growth across the key segments they use to differentiate themselves in a competitive, complex retail environment.

 

Syndigo developed its unified platform over time, standardizing on Microsoft Azure, while bringing together capabilities that were architected leveraging on-premises infrastructure, Oracle Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. As part of its strategic vision, Syndigo aligned with Microsoft to deliver on industry-specific use cases and solutions tied to the Azure platform, and it embraced Microsoft 365.

 

At the same time, Syndigo wanted a scalable digital platform it could use across the information ecosystem—hosting its MDM and PIM services while onboarding, managing, and syndicating data. This was the foundation for a cloud-native technology stack. “We saw Azure as a natural fit,” says Citino. “When we tell leading brands, manufacturers, and retailers that we’re 100% software as a service and 100% built on Microsoft, that builds confidence and trust. Azure has a trusted place among retail and consumer goods companies, which represent most of our customers.”

Paving a path to becoming cloud-centric with Azure

Syndigo wanted to enable smooth implementation and gain efficiencies of scale with Azure. IT staff simplified and streamlined the company’s infrastructure in Azure, making the most of the broad set of hosted services and features offered across the entire Microsoft ecosystem. “As we migrated to the cloud and gained confidence in the capabilities available through Microsoft, we switched a lot of services to the hosted component rather than trying to run anything in our own infrastructure, and our datacenter footprint consistently shrinks year after year,” says Vishal Arora, Chief Technology Officer at Syndigo. “At some point, we’ll be totally cloud-centric with Azure.”

 

The company uses a diverse range of Azure products and services to meet multiple business needs, including dynamic application scaling with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and unified analytics with Azure Databricks. “We involve Azure in every product engineering and development decision we make,” says Gopal Ramakrishnan, Vice President of Architecture at Syndigo. With the products both up and running and already generating value, data engineering and data science teams have been able to work together more efficiently than before within the Azure Databricks environment, which has accelerated their ability to build and deploy large-scale data analytics projects and data models that serve organizational needs. The environment is easily accessible via Azure Data Factory, a key part of the company’s data integration strategy, Power BI, and other Azure services. At the same time, by embedding Power BI in its products, Syndigo offers clients an interactive and intuitive platform to visualize and analyze their data. Externally, this empowers clients to derive actionable insights and make data-driven decisions, but it also serves as a key internal driver for delivering efficiencies and revenue-driving insights.

 

Containerized microservice architecture on AKS is also key to Syndigo’s deployments and overall scalability. Individual containers can scale up and down as required, with some set up to scale automatically. A few years ago, the company had a choice to go directly with Kubernetes or Azure-managed Kubernetes. “Experiencing the reliability of Azure and seeing Microsoft’s roadmap for Kubernetes made it an easy decision,” recalls Ramakrishnan. “Now, every single thing we host is managed with AKS. The scalability we needed to keep up with open-source Kubernetes meant lots of overhead for us. But with Azure, everything is simplified, and development time is much shorter, plus all the security needs are addressed. We can focus on what we do best instead of always trying to keep up.”

 

As a hosted software company, Syndigo places critical importance on security. It relies on Microsoft Defender for Cloud and a selection of third-party ISV partners to protect its environment, including back-end systems that primarily run on Linux-based operating systems such as Debian 12. The Syndigo information security team is evaluating Microsoft Defender for Containers given the company’s large AKS presence. “As we get into handling personal data, a lot of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and data residency requirements come into play,” says Arora. “That’s where Azure, with its footprint across geographies, will become an important contributor in that story as well.”

Getting ahead with specialized support, familiar technology, and new capabilities

As a partner-first organization, Syndigo collaborates with Microsoft above and beyond receiving support for technology questions and for exploring new technology focus areas. “Syndigo augments Microsoft industry stories and use cases in key mutual industries, so from a go-to-market standpoint, the support is validating, but more importantly, it creates alignment on key industry use cases in retail, consumer packaged goods, and manufacturing,” says Citino. The company also works with more than 100 partners that implement Sydigo solutions on top of the Azure stack. Many of these are Microsoft partners, including global systems integrators such as Accenture, Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services. “Our partners’ high degree of familiarity with Microsoft technology makes for a better end customer experience for our mutual customers,” adds Citino.

 

Given all the different services and support systems in its toolkit, Syndigo consistently brings new applications out faster than its competitors—and it’s able to do so without worrying about breaking the bank, helping it further scale and target different markets. “Microsoft gives us the ability to look at cost optimization tools in the Azure portal, forecast our spend, and learn how much chargeback is occurring in our account for certain features or capabilities that we’re using,” explains Arora. “Our ability to be cost competitive has to do with how our application is constructed today and what it takes to configure and customize it and bring customers onboard. We also optimize the Azure infrastructure so we don’t spend as much to add more customers to a pod.”

 

Syndigo is confident running Linux and other open-source software on Azure, knowing that products and services will continue to work together rather than against each other. Aurora continues, “With Microsoft co-opting and adapting to open-source technology stacks, we can deploy all of those on Azure without being restricted to only Microsoft, and the heterogeneous architecture deployment that we see on Azure has definitely been an enabler for us.”

 

Given how closely the current business landscape is tied to AI, expansive generative AI capabilities are a major focus for Syndigo and its customers. “In the MDM and content syndication world, generative AI is in every RFP, whether it’s explicit or implicit,” says Citino. Thanks to the company’s cost optimization structure, Syndigo has been able to invest in Azure AI Services and appreciates that it can take advantage of Azure OpenAI Service and different language models, including its own. “We see lots of opportunities where AI can optimize experiences internally and externally, providing insights and improving the experience for our customers,” says Arora. “With Azure AI Services, we have the flexibility to pick best-of-breed language models that have been built or tuned for a particular use case, and that’s an amazing ability. For example, we can pick up Llama 2 or any other third-party language model, put it into our AI services environment, and use it.”

Continuing the journey

Syndigo has continued to expand its capabilities and gain significant efficiencies with its Azure implementation, including accelerating digital commerce for its customers by more than 40%. It can also point to the growth in its customer base and new solutions over the last five years as proof of its success. “With Azure as an enabling platform underneath our software, we have the flexibility to build a seamless experience—the double infinity loop as we like to call it—across the e-commerce value chain,” says Arora. “We value the richness of the feature set that’s available to us, the flexibility we get with the Microsoft technology stack models, and the partnership with Microsoft that has helped us through our transitions and migrations.”

 

Syndigo is excited about the capabilities offered by Microsoft Fabric to enhance its data capabilities with comprehensive management, integration, and analytics tools designed to streamline customer-facing solutions and drive greater engagements with clients. “Leveraging a platform like Microsoft Fabric will allow us to bring raw data to insights faster, solving business needs at the pace they require,” says Citino. “It’s a major asset for us to lean on core Microsoft technology to stay in line with where we’re developing our solutions moving forward.”

 

Discover more about Syndigo on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and YouTube.

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