SpringCM

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Case study | SpringCM
Deep into data
Managing customer information has never
been a simple process. Even in the days
when the Rolodex ruled the desk, it was an
incomplete solution. Index cards lled with
microscopic scribbles that attempted to bring
the customer’s contact information to life were
only as good as the intentions of their keepers
and the eiciency of their ling system.
Move 40 years into the future, and the massive
database has long replaced the circular index
card organizer. The sales game itself hasn’t
changed, but the depth of the data has. Used
proactively, that information can dramatically
improve customer relations and maximize
sales.
SpringCM is a leader in the document
management space, and its cloud workow
platform oers sales teams the ability to
streamline, share, and automate processes to
eliminate stumbling blocks in the sales cycle.
Getting to know your
documents
If you know where your customer-related
documents are, how they’re related to the sale,
and how you can access them quickly, you’re
a step ahead of most people. “Document
management isn’t just about storage and
retrieval,” explains Chris King, vice president
of operations at SpringCM. “It’s about enabling
sales teams to manage documents and
related metadata across desktop and mobile
platforms regardless of physical location.”
The platform dovetails with popular CRM
software suite Salesforce.com to streamline
the contract lifecycle from creation through
negotiation, approvals, signature, archiving,
and renewals.
In order to make that happen, data is
extracted from every document uploaded
to the SpringCM document cloud. “For each
document we receive, there’s a lot going
on behind the scenes,” King relates. “From
workow engines to PDF manipulation, OCR
to document merging—lots of things are
happening that create value for our users
on top of what they would be getting from
Salesforce.com.”
Exponential growth
Adding that value for the customer comes
with a price for SpringCM. “What we ended
up discovering is that we are generating a
lot of data on the back end that needs to be
analyzed, sorted, and retrieved, and then
delivered to our customers,” King says.
According to SpringCM CTO, Antonis
Papatsaras, the amount of data is growing
exponentially. “Every document somebody
uploads takes 40-80 workload steps,”
Papatsaras explains. “And each time someone
views a document online, it takes another
2-3 workload steps. What it adds up to is that
our infrastructure needs to process 2 million
workload steps per hour. It’s an insane amount
of data.”
SpringCM was beginning to think that its
traditional server architecture and relational
database system might not be able to
sustain the kind of growth the company was
experiencing. “Today it’s 2 million steps per
hour, but that quickly becomes 4 million and
then 8 million,” Papatsaras says. “About six
months ago, we began to realize we were
reaching our capacity limits and this was
impacting document retrieval performance.”