An F5 NGINX customer, Medallia is a customer experience company headquartered in San Francisco with roughly $500 million in annual revenue. We recently interviewed Vinnie Chhabra, an IT engineer at Medallia, to find out how NGINX Plus has helped the Software as a Service (SaaS) company improve security while saving IT time.
Q: Tell us a little about Medallia and what your company does.
Chhabra: We’re the leader in customer experience. For the past two decades, we’ve helped customers across a variety of industries—from hospitality to retail to healthcare—better understand how customers experience their business. Our enterprise experience Software as a Service platform captures data across voice, video, digital, IoT, social media, and corporate-messaging tools—using proprietary AI and machine learning technology to turn this information into powerful insights. Using our platform, our customers reduce churn, pinpoint sales opportunities, improve customer support, and drive better business decisions.
Q: What led you to NGINX Plus?
Chhabra: All of our applications are externally accessible, and we’ve used NGINX Open Source for years to protect access to our back-end servers. About three years ago, our team began adding nodes to our back-end servers as a high availability strategy, and we decided to move to NGINX Plus to avoid the time and labor of managing this manually.
““To be successful, we all need fast, reliable solutions. NGINX Plus helps you achieve that—while providing the advanced security that’s needed in today’s increasingly risky climate.” —Vinnie Chhabra, IT Engineer, Medallia”
Q: Did you consider other web server products?
Chabbra: Yes, among the other vendors we looked at were Apache and HA Proxy. Ultimately, we found NGINX Plus to be the most scalable and secure. It has built-in modules that we’d otherwise have to compile manually—and we appreciate the great technical support it offers. The MyF5.com account makes it easy to download patches and products, and when I submit a ticket, I usually get a reply in minutes. Most other vendors take hours to respond, so that’s a big difference.
Q: How has NGINX Plus helped your business?
Chhabra: It’s improved security and reduced labor. Our back-end servers store a lot of intellectual property, and NGINX Plus has helped us prevent unauthorized access. It also helps us to quickly thwart an attack should one occur. The other thing about NGINX Plus is that it’s easy to get started. If we want to implement something, most of the time we can simply find an existing module and customize it to our liking. That saves a lot of IT time.
Q: What advice do you have for other companies considering NGINX Plus?
Chhabra: To be successful, we all need fast, reliable solutions. NGINX Plus helps you achieve that—while providing the advanced security that’s needed in today’s increasingly risky climate.
To learn more about how NGINX Plus is helping Medallia fight cybercrime, check out the full customer story.
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