Blip Eliminates CRM Module Downtime with MongoDB

THE CHALLENGE

Moving past an outdated legacy database

Blip, a fast-growing technology company, connects thousands of businesses around the world through its AI-powered communications platform. The company enables organizations to create automated conversational experiences across channels such as WhatsApp and Instagram, supporting more than 50 million daily conversations throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from marketing to customer service.

With the business growing between 40% and 50% annually, the previous database could not keep up with the increasing data volume of its critical CRM platform. This resulted in frequent downtime, negative impact on customer experience, and rising operational costs. To achieve a modern, flexible, and scalable solution, Blip adopted MongoDB—and the results exceeded expectations.

“Using a relational database means having a fixed schema, which does not provide the flexibility our customers need,” said Paulo Henrique Cardoso Mendonça, Director of Software Engineering at Blip. The highly skilled team could not afford to spend time managing complex infrastructure.

As a result, the company revised its database strategy to ensure scalability, eliminate downtime, and provide the necessary flexibility. MongoDB was identified as the best solution.

OUR SOLUTION

Using MongoDB Atlas to eliminate downtime and accelerate performance by 4.5 times

Blip’s team rigorously evaluated several different technologies to find the right fit. However, the decision to embrace MongoDB was “kind of a no-brainer,” as Mendonça put it. “MongoDB was in the sweet spot where we would get the flexibility and scalability we needed for the solution, all at a good price,” he said. Several Blip engineers, including Mendonça himself, also had prior experience with MongoDB Community Edition. “We knew that it would be a great solution for this issue,” said Mendonça.

The company chose MongoDB Atlas, a document model database, primarily for its efficiency and speed. “MongoDB Atlas can deliver all that out of the box, making it the fastest way for us to solve the problem,” said Mendonça. Furthermore, MongoDB Atlas works well with Microsoft Azure . Blip partners closely with Microsoft for its internal processes. The seamless billing integration of MongoDB into Azure’s Marketplace enabled Blip to align with existing processes with zero friction or overhead.

Blip transitioned its CRM module by converting SQL Server schemas directly to MongoDB documents in just a couple of months. The MongoDB Professional Services team helped implement a phased rollout, starting with smaller customers.

Since migrating its CRM module to MongoDB Atlas, Blip has completely eliminated downtime. The company has also improved performance. Average application response improved by a factor of 4.5 times—requests that previously took 40 to 50 milliseconds with SQL Server now respond in about 10 milliseconds. Moreover, MongoDB Atlas is running at 10% of the previously required computing and storage capacity.

“Even though I had lots of experience with MongoDB, and I knew it would perform well, it actually surpassed my expectations,” said Mendonça. “Our platform has a significant volume of data, so I didn’t know how well this big workload was going to scale. But it went better than I expected.”

OUTCOME

Future-proofing Blip’s CRM module and setting the stage for growth

The CRM module now boasts enhanced scalability and is essentially future proof. Blip’s successful database migration serves as a model and proof point for its goal to scale its entire platform 100 times beyond its 2024 capacity. Plans are in place to migrate other legacy workloads to MongoDB and introduce additional features. These include MongoDB Atlas Vector Search, which is the native semantic search functionality of MongoDB, as well as full-text search. This will deliver Blip a unified and efficient technology stack, enabling a wide range of robust search and gen AI capabilities.

“Blip is the most stable it’s been since I began working here, and we’ve laid the groundwork for a big future,” said Mendonça. “MongoDB has enabled us to dream bigger as a company—it feels like we can scale until we’re providing service to the entire world.”