However, Sovren’s legacy, on-premise search solution, dtSearch, wasn’t performing well at scale. Customers were hitting a search performance ceiling at about 4 million resumes and installations were starting to rot from lack of customer attention to required maintenance activities, and performance was declining.
Before switching to Elastic, it was painfully difficult for customers to get the matching product to work -- and to keep it working well. While it was easy to justify spending time supporting large companies, Sovren couldn’t justify adding enough resources to devote to lower-revenue deals, so they chose not to market the product to that segment of the market. This closed off a potentially lucrative source of expansion and ongoing revenue.
With growth in mind, Sovren knew that they had to deal with the underlying engine scalability problem.