This week, Sébastien CTO @ Fiscalité & Territoire tells us about the challenges the company faces on a daily basis and his experience using Clever Cloud.
Fiscalité & Territoire offers both consultancy and software for regional authorities to optimize their taxation revenue optimization.
Can you introduce Fiscalité & Territoire?
We are a consulting company on taxation revenue optimization for regional authorities such as municipalities, intercommunalities, districts, counties, departments, regions… The State, via the Directorate-General of Taxes (DGI), produces large documents about taxation revenue and dotations and send them to regional authorities. Our core mission is to help the regional authorities to automate the process of making these docs searchable, readable and understandable.
We have two services. The first one is traditional consulting with taxation experts consultants who help the regional authorities in their revenue optimization. The second one is the edition of a dedicated software which help both consultants and customers to optimize the use of their dotation by budgetting more precisely.
How did you come up with the idea?
In some regional authorities, there are some taxation experts but, most of the time, especially in small entities, it’s a skill no one has. This is why regional entities rely on external consultants. But, in larger entities, the amount of data to deal with is so big that it is not really humanly possible. These are the two main reasons of our existence and growth. It is also why we offer two value propositions: consulting and software.
What do your users love about your product?
Mostly, the fact that we offer an online experience make us really different from the competition. We made that choice quite early in our industry and today, it helps to win deals. Our interface is getting better and better also. We have invested time and hired experts to make it even better.
What is your main difficulty at the moment?
Clearly the volume of data we have to manage to offer a service to our customers. With that amount of data, switching from one database scheme to another is a real challenge. Avoiding legacy too and it’s even more crucial.
What is the coming future of Fiscalité & Territoire?
We are migrating our Database. It is a very large PostgreSQL database of 400 GB of data. Even if we offer our product in SaaS, we migrate on a per customer basis. We don’t migrate all our customers at once. The main reason is because we have to train them. This kind of migration is also possible because each customer’s data is partitioned.
Why did you switch to Clever Cloud and was it easy?
[…] I quickly saw that the custom support was a real advantage
Some time ago, we were a tech team of 3 people. There was a system administrator, another developer and myself. The system administrator left and quickly I was alone. I was used to deploy on other kinds of PaaS and I didn’t want to manage all the system administration issues. For legal issues, our hosting had to be physically located in France. Therefore, I searched on the web for a French cloud PaaS. We started to talk about our needs and I quickly saw that the custom support was a real advantage.
What do you like most on Clever Cloud?
The custom touch. For instance, we needed a Windows Server because we have a plugin for Excel exports. Same thing for Tableau, the Business Intelligence products. We asked, Clever Cloud added it, just for us. The Elasticsearch cluster is also very cool.
What feature are you expecting the most?
A lot! There are so many emails I’ve sent you 😉 Today, maybe the most important thing to me is to be able to view server performances. I’ve had access to your private beta of your coming tool. I think you are still working on it.
How would you pitch Clever Cloud to a non-technical person?
It’s a bit like us. Just like our customers externalize very specific skills: taxation consultancy ; we externalize all the system administration to Clever Cloud. Just like our customers trust us for the advices we provide, we trust you for the security of our data.