Workspaces Reimagined Across APAC, Europe, and the USA

Our impact

• Upgraded to an enterprise-grade platform on Google Cloud with high scalability, reliability and availability across 3 continents
• Implemented multi-region scalability to enable RICOH Spaces to rapidly expand geographically with a templatised “click-to-deploy” solution
• Supported 50+ customer migrations with 20+ migrated in a single day in a matter of hours

 

“The platform has already supported 50+ customer migrations, across 3 phases, with over 20 customers migrated in a single day, taking just hours end-to-end.” – Nathan Thomas, Head of Product, Ricoh Digital Experience

 

About the client

Ricoh Digital Experience (RDx) is the technology arm of Ricoh, ​​a leading global provider of digital services, information management, and print and imaging solutions designed to support digital transformation and optimise business performance. Its products and services reach forward-thinking customers in approximately 200 countries and regions around the world. 

RDx developed an innovative cloud-hosted workplace enhancement platform called RICOH Spaces which integrates activities such as desk booking, meeting room management, wayfinding and more to transform the modern office experience. After the explosive growth of RICOH Spaces, RDx was looking to migrate RICOH Spaces to a platform architecture that can scale with the needs and agility of the product. 

 

The challenge

RICOH spaces needed to be migrated from their initial, monolithic platform set-up on Google Cloud, to a platform architecture that could rapidly scale across multiple regions whilst maintaining security best practices.

The new platform needed to have:

• Multi-region scalability – “Click to deploy” identical infrastructure within multiple regions, to ensure global scalability of RICOH Spaces.
• Platform scalability – to meet the expected growth of RICOH Spaces.
• Minimal downtime – while maintaining a low-maintenance platform.
• Data residency – to ensure all data and compute are within a single region.

To allow for this, the monolithic set-up needed to be separated into microservices; these then required orchestration to communicate with each other.

“We needed to achieve an enterprise-grade platform with high scalability, reliability and availability in multiple regions including the USA, Europe and Asia Pacific whilst maintaining our ability to deliver functionality with ease.” – Nathan Thomas, Head of Product, Ricoh Digital Experience

To future-proof the platform, it needed to follow best practices in automated platform and application build, shifted-left security and permissions model, SLO-based product uptime and automated SLI-based metrics, as well as API management.

 

Our solution

To meet RICOH Spaces platform needs, Datatonic worked with the RDx team to build a best-in-class platform with high scalability, reliability and availability, addressing data residency and security requirements.

The team began with a design phase to review the existing platform built on Google Cloud and provide detailed recommendations on improvements to the contemporary design for scalability and overall product latency.

Datatonic then worked with the client to transform their initial set-up, by:

• Creating a Terraform Infrastructure as Code deployment, modularised to replicate the platform across multiple regions.
• Implementing Service Level Objectives along with corresponding Service Level Indicators which monitor and track uptime across all deployed microservices using Cloud Monitoring. 
• Building CICD using GitHub Actions and NX dev to deploy only affected services on code change.
• Migrating away from the initial manually created Cloud Run/Cloud Function solution to a fully automated Cloud Run deployment.
• Implementing security best practices and guidelines such as workload identity federation.
• Enabling service discovery in Cloud Run so that RICOH Spaces’ 30+ microservices can communicate effectively.
• Developed a reusable load-testing solution, to ensure the platform could handle high levels of traffic and usage during peak demands.

“Datatonic enabled us to go beyond our expectations for our RICOH Spaces Platform. Rarely do you tick every box with a large-scale requirement, but we have been able to deliver on all requirements, enabling us to go further than ever with our mission to provide the best workplace platform to our customers.” – Nathan Thomas, Head of Product, Ricoh Digital Experience

 

The upgraded platform has multi-region scalability – so the RDx team can take a single code base, and deploy it to any or all environments, accelerating rollouts to new regions.  On top of this, the microservices architecture means that RDx can roll out updates to its platform quickly and efficiently, maximising the number of companies that can drive effective ways of working and improve collaboration in their workspaces. 

With the infrastructure and application both automatically scaling to new customer workloads, customers can be migrated onto the RICOH Spaces platform in a matter of hours end-to-end. As RICOH Spaces’ infrastructure can rapidly scale, the capability supports their growth and customer onboarding. 

Finally, the set-up has cost optimisation built-in across cloud infrastructure, to significantly reduce cloud spend while maintaining the same level of performance and scalability.