PAYONEER

Customer profile - Payoneer is a leading ISV in Israel, enabling millions of businesses from more than 200 countries to facilitate seamless, cross-border payments. Recently ranked in the top 100 of Inc. 5000’s Financial Services companies (second to PayPal), Payoneer supports customers such as Airbnb, eBay and Amazon and transacting billions of dollars each month.

Sela has a track record of over 3 decades in leading the consulting and technology knowledge in Israel. Sela, as an MSP helped Payoneer reaching their business goals on Microsoft Azure.

PAYONEER BUSINESS PROBLEMS THAT WERE TACKLED

Sela was approached by Microsoft to help, Payoneer. Our SMEs, together with Microsoft Architects and Payoneer engineers identified the following challenges: Using Sela’s Managed Services, your organization may leverage its IT services and extend far beyond current capabilities. Using various scenarios you may choose to
1.  Identify new business models and challenges
2.  High operational fee due in payment transactions
3.  Scaling issues for supporting large data volumes

In order to be able to offer their payment service in China, Payoneer had to meet some Chinese market regulations:

• Timeline considerations were very limiting, and the time they had to finalize their deployment was not sufficient.
• Payoneer wanted to use Cloudera’s solution for their big data requirements but they faced a lot of issues when trying to integrate Cloudera’s solution.

 

PAYONEER HAD A FEW PROBLEMS:

• Constant analysis of big data
• Generation of reports for management

 

HOW DID SELA HELP?

Sela has a unique positioning as an SI, a Software House and a Training Partner. This enables us to give a 360 to the client from the Infrastructure, through DevOps, to the Data and Development, not only giving them the best solution, but also to make a transformation within the teams, by providing a comprehensive knowledge transfer and a state of mind transformation. We at Sela believe we should forget about “Lift & Shift”, it is not a unique enough solution and it leaves the conversation around pricing. You can Win Compere in some cases, but even if you do that, other vendors will win back eventually. We found that the best competitive solution and the most robust one is “Lift & Transform”. We find the best business and technology solution against the current IaaS AWS architecture. Usually it involve in Azure PaaS elements, in most cases a combination of Big Data, AI, Containers and specific Azure native components (AKS / Azure SQL / Cosmos DB / Data lake / ML / etc.). This “Transformation” from IaaS into PaaS and Services brings the best of Azure, both in technology and pricing and increases the client’s stickiness in scale. In addition, SELA has developed unique IPs of its own: OneDrop, Dr. Dump and 3 DevOps tools (Scrat , WimBi, WiMigrator.

THE SOLUTION AREAS

The solution covered combines the following areas: Open Source, Modern Workplace, Data and AI, and Infrastructure.

THE MAIN BENEFITS ACHIEVED

• Cost Reduction by implementing predictive and corrective measurements to the transaction process
• By building a new AI model with Cloudera on Azure, Payoneer was able to gain new business insights from data to improve the business model
• Payoneer originally based their solution on AWS (account of more than 1M USD)
• Our solution helped them reduce their costs to an average of 40K USD per month over Azure in a period of less than 3 months.
• The service we provided enabled Payoneer to meet their strict timeline and as a result – they can offer their services in the Chinese market and gained a contract of over 3M USD.

 

THE MAIN TECHNOLOGIES THAT WERE INVOLVED IN THE SOLUTION

• SELA’s experts delivered the following infrastructure solution for Payoneer (All the below technologies were deployed over Payoneer’s new Azure subscription):
• Established a Spoke and Hub network configuration
• The Hub includes central management tools:
• Cloudera Director
• Cloudera Repo
• Linux Repo
• Chef repo
• Redundant connection to Payoneer’s datacenters.
• The Spokes serve as separators across Payoneer’s different environments – Development, Staging and Production

• For a streamlined DevOps best practices, SELA’s experts created:
• Custom templates to adjust Cloudera Director to Payoneer’s solution and their mode of operation.
• Developed automation for creating the Hub and the different Spokes and for establishing Cloudera based on Cloudera Director’s automation.
• Created local Repos (not auto-synced) - this enabled Payoneer to prevent internet access from the different Spokes, a requirement set by their Information Security Dept.
• Connected Payoneer’s on-premise datacenter management systems to the Azure-based solution for authentication and configuration management needs.

PAYONEER’S IMPRESSION FROM WORKING WITH US

“Working with SELA proved to be a key factor in our success in meeting the challenge of the Chinese contract. SELA’s experts helped us design and implement a solution which needed to be custom made to our needs and deployed to Azure.

The team accompanied us during all the phases of activity, from architecture and infrastructure design, the implementation and deployment of the design and its configuration.

The value SELA brought to the table surpassed the technological domain and impacted our business directly by enabling our expansion into new markets. Working with SELA was a very good experience for us, through the engagement SELA kept as transparent as possible and their team made sure they don’t leave before a comprehensive knowledge transfer was carried out – so we can more easily maintain our system.”

- Yaron Weiss, VP IT-Operations & corporate security, Payoneer