AWS Boosts Ephesoft’s Tech Stack

As a growing number of Ephesoft’s customers moved their on-premises environments to the cloud, the company knew they needed to build a native cloud capture solution and consolidate and streamline the product onto one platform. In early 2018, Ephesoft began using AWS as a platform for its core product Ephesoft Transact for new cloud instances, while still supporting other platforms that customers use.

There were multiple factors that led to implementing AWS. First, Ephesoft’s resources were experts with broad skill sets on AWS’s infrastructure. Another factor was that the engineering team wanted to build a system based on serverless architecture and AWS had a proven track record with mature serverless capabilities. Additionally, Ephesoft wanted to leverage robust Platform-as-a-Service capabilities from AWS.

“As we continue to build our product roadmap, it became clear that leveraging innovative AI and machine learning tools is a necessary part of our strategy,” said Kevin Harbaurer, CTO at Ephesoft. “AWS has a powerful set of data science tools in the cloud that we need to create accelerated models.”

Ephesoft is sourcing a number of services from AWS that reduced the burden of building and maintaining the system ourselves. Harbauer noted that on AWS’s platform, we can use tools like Amazon SageMaker, a fully-managed service that covers the entire machine learning workflow to label and prepare your data, choose an algorithm, train the model, tune and optimize it for deployment, make predictions, and take action. The models that are developed get to production faster with much less effort and lower cost.

Similarly, AWS Lambda provides massive scalability and event-driven architecture needed by Ephesoft’s document processing engine to provide a first-class customer experience. Ephesoft is also able to use Amazon Textract to handle the OCR needs of the system. Another tool that Ephesoft’s engineering team uses is Amazon Cognito to handle some of the authentications including integration with Single Sign On. These tools help make Ephesoft’s solution more scalable and efficient.

In early 2019, Ephesoft released the industry’s first hybrid solution that easily transitions the most resource-intensive processes into the cloud for peak or high-volume performance, scalability and lower upfront costs. This first-to-market hybrid offering on AWS enables organizations to optimize and scale their existing Ephesoft Transact on-premises solution while providing improved performance including allowing users to process up to 2,100 pages per minute – more than 10 times faster than a strictly on-premises version. The new pay as they go pricing model, made possible by AWS, allows clients to scale their processing capacity and solve new business challenges without additional infrastructure costs or capital expenditures.

Ephesoft Cloud HyperExtender is an add-on application that leverages high-performance cloud image processing on AWS in conjunction with Ephesoft Transact, which leverages supervised machine learning to optimize operational efficiency in document-intensive processes. After documents are captured in the on-premises system, the processing-intensive Optical Character Recognition (OCR) task is directed into the cloud for fast processing, and then directed back into the on-premises system for classification, extraction, validation and export.

“Ephesoft Transact Cloud HyperExtender allows us to create solutions for intelligent capture in ways we could not before,” said Pat Myers, Executive Vice President and Co-Founder of Zia Consulting, a platinum-level Ephesoft partner. “Many customers have high peaks that used to require us to architect a tailored solution in order to handle the volume. Now, we can create a base system and offload much of the heavy lifting to the cloud to still meet the required SLA.”

“With our customers on AWS, we’ve already seen faster implementations and the ability to scale customer workflows using Ephesoft,” Harbauer stated. He also described how the speed of development is enhanced by reducing the amount of peripheral work required by the engineering, IT and product teams. With the AWS platform, the team now spends less time on operational overhead and can focus their efforts on developing solutions instead of keeping the servers running.

By optimizing AWS, the time to bring Ephesoft solutions to market has decreased while the ability to quickly iterate on our solutions has increased. Using the AWS tools, common services and functionality increases the team’s focus and velocity on solving unique business problems for Ephesoft customers. “The platform allows us to embrace our core values of inventing the future for our customers. We are proactive in solving the problems of tomorrow, today,” stated Harbauer. Customers who experience massive increases or fluctuation in traffic can readily scale with Ephesoft’s solution.

“There’s a growing awareness and urgency to accelerate content capture and automation processes. Enterprises are realizing the value of their data, so we see our cloud services growing rapidly,” Harbauer predicted. It’s no secret that cloud environments don’t have traditional infrastructure costs and customer data can be accessed on-demand. Technology is evolving at such a rapid pace, that Ephesoft predicts that those that don’t adopt cloud platforms will be at a major competitive disadvantage.