Here at Kloudless, we take great pride in helping companies reach their goals through the use of our products. Whether it’s saving time and money, getting to market quicker, or helping their integrations scale at a faster pace; we absolutely enjoy hearing how our Unified APIs have helped so many codebases find the success they so deserve.



That’s why when we have the chance to sit down with a client and hear about their achievements using Kloudless, we document those stories and share them with our followers. To help you get a better idea of how Kloudless has helped some of these companies with their unique use cases, we’ve collected a few of our favorite case studies in the following article. Read on and see the benefits that Kloudless Unified APIs presented to these exciting companies.

1. Solving the Storage Challenge



Recently an educational technology company, Blackboard, signed up for Kloudless in order to move beyond its inherited, bespoke integration strategy. With a user base of 90 million, Blackboard’s core product is an educational platform made for both teachers and students to communicate and collaborate outside of the classroom. Their platform requires cloud storage functionality so educators and students alike can store their files, assignments, and other assets in any number of popular cloud storage services like DropBox, Box, Google Drive, and more.



The problem they encountered when trying to connect to these services wasn’t the integrations themselves; it was the maintenance and upkeep required to keep them working. Over three years of maintaining their bespoke integration, Blackboard went through more than 600 JIRA tickets and racked up approximately 8,800 hours towards a single integration alone. At this point, they began to weigh the feasibility of being able to build and maintain connections to all of the services their application would need.



Through Kloudless’ Unified Storage API, they were able to relieve themselves of the massive headache of maintaining their current integrations, while also incorporating many more cloud storage services into their app than their development team would have had the time and resources to devote towards. With Kloudless, Blackboard was able to save up to $150,000 and 5,000 hours of developer time a year, while simultaneously ensuring reliable access to the multiple software services their application needed to make certain that end users would have access to all of their preferred services.



Read all about their journey to finding the perfect storage solution here.

2. Scheduling Success

We’ve seen a boost in companies using Kloudless in the employee success space and thought we’d share one of their achievements. The company covered in this article, O.C. Tanner, chose Kloudless for its specific calendaring needs. O.C. Tanner builds employee experience apps which reinforce employees’ sense of purpose, accomplishment, and connection to one another. For example, an app could acknowledge an employee for repeatedly engaging in behaviors that improve well-being, such as exercise or meditation. This functionality required reliable integration with cloud calendar services such as Outlook, Google Calendar and more.



To start, the company built an integration with Microsoft Outlook from scratch themselves. This endeavor took a full-time developer over 6 months to finally deploy. With over 12 million users across 150+ countries, this pace would never work for them to incorporate all of their desired calendar services in a timely fashion. On top of that, they also required integrations at scale, with a variety of calendar services and feature options for their diverse end-user base.

Given Kloudless’ expertise in the native cloud calendar service APIs, the Kloudless Unified Calendar API offered pre-built features that O.C. Tanner would no longer need to spend time building out–everything from CRUD endpoints for event data to real-time webhooks. What’s more, Kloudless took care of maintaining the calendar service integrations so the O.C. Tanner engineers wouldn’t have to.



O.C. Tanner estimates that using Kloudless saved upwards of $75K and six months of development time within a year. Read more about their journey to finding scheduling success through Kloudless here.



3. Managing Customer’s Relations

Our last case study involves a company, Bigtincan, that needed popular CRM integrations. Bigtincan had made a name for themselves by providing data enrichment and task automation to customer sales teams throughout North America. The company zeroed in on sales team pain points, such as the manual data entry and clean-up work that keeps reps from focusing on relationship-based selling. They had tasked their engineering team with integrating to the most popular CRM, Salesforce, with a plan to add more CRM integrations in the near future.



The problem they encountered was mostly due to the vast differences in functionality that their customers required. Some needed real-time data syncing while others needed different data parameters auto-populated. This led to Bigtincan’s engineers being tasked with rabbit-holing into the Salesforce API documentation over and over again in the pursuit of adding these pieces of functionality. Next and not least of their worries, with each additional customer came the request to connect to another CRM with its own API specifications. As these issues arose and delays ensued, Bigtincan began to lose more deals to their competitors who already had built connections to the additional CRMs.

In researching a way to scale their CRM integrations, Bigtincan discovered Kloudless. The Unified CRM API simplified their task by providing a single abstraction layer for most of the CRM functionality their integration needed. With Kloudless, Bigtincan could perform CRUD operations to any object in a user’s CRM account, taking advantage of several standardized data models for common objects such as Accounts and Leads. Kloudless also supplied a unified query language that abstracted away the specifics of other query languages such as SOQL and Dynamics’. Once Bigtincan connected to several cloud storage services, they noticed they integrated additional services 12 times faster than they had prior to leveraging a Unified API. To add icing to the integrations cake, Kloudless took care of the maintenance of the storage and CRM APIs they connected to, decreasing Bigtincan’s maintenance overhead by a factor of four. Read more about Bigtincan’s decision to integrate with Kloudless here.

Many companies solve their integration problems with Kloudless’ Unified APIs, and we look forward to seeing the unique ways that applications will go about using them in the future.The examples illustrated in this article cover 3 of Kloudless’ most popular Unified APIs — Calendar, Storage, and CRM — but there are even more offerings that your codebase can use to empower its functionality. Kloudless also offers a Construction API, an ITSM API, as well as multiple UI tools that are easy to embed into your application to get your users integrated quickly. If you’d like to share your company’s use case with the Kloudless Unified APIs, please write us at hello@kloudless.com and share it with us!

