Sovren: Delivering Digital Transformation with Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud

Over the course of five years, Sovren spent an enormous amount of money in an effort to update the search technology. Every approach failed. For example, when they moved the solution to Solr, they still hit a scalability barrier at 4-5 million resumes, where search degraded, along with the user experience. Plus, as they looked for a cloud-native solution, Solr’s offering would not satisfy their requirements.  

When James Parks joined Sovren as the lead architect of the company’s matching product, he quickly turned things around. In his previous role at a consulting firm, Parks’ colleagues had often used Elasticsearch to address similar search issues, so he set out to see if it could be the fix Sovren needed.

Parks asked President Robert Ruff for two weeks to prove that Elasticsearch was a good fit.
Ruff was skeptical, because he had seen “two weeks” turn into “two months” on proofs-of-concept, but he still gave Parks the green light, warning him that at three weeks, the project would be killed.

And Parks delivered. He built a proof of concept on Elasticsearch Service in 48 hours, and completed a customer-ready product on a new architecture within 3 weeks. Scalability tests blew through previous barriers. Sovren had found its path forward..

Sovren no longer has to sacrifice speed for accuracy. Before, Sovren paid a high price on performance to eliminate “clipping” (e.g. partial data results that may not surface a resume at the bottom of the shard.) Now, Elasticsearch searches the full shard with zero impact on performance, so that recruiters can be confident they’re seeing complete and accurate results for relevant resumes. Ruff says, “Our product was stunted, but with Elasticsearch, that’s now solved. We turned it into a huge viable product line for us that we don’t see any limits to other than our own marketing.”

Along with solving Sovren’s decades-long search challenge, Elasticsearch Service was a natural fit for Sovren as they adopted a cloud-first approach to their business. The deployment on Elastic Cloud removed onerous administrative burdens, enabling Sovren to refocus time and energy from operational challenges to strategic development. 

Free of the operations shackles that created product deployment timelines of 4-6 months, Sovren could now deploy new features and updates in days with no risk of losing performance over time. That means that new prospects can be instantly onboarded using a self-service portal, and have a fully-working instance of Sovren’s AI Matching product ready to use within minutes, not months.

Elasticsearch Service has also given Sovren the peace of mind that it can readily handle additional customers and their growing data as cluster capacity increases are only a few clicks away within the Elastic Cloud console. “That’s the magic the Elastic Cloud brings. Elastic manages it all for us”, says Parks.

And after two years on Elastic Cloud, they’ve had zero downtime (scheduled or unscheduled) and zero performance complaints.

By delivering on the promise of real-time search, eliminating the need for index maintenance, and simplifying onboarding, maintenance, and support with a cloud-native architecture, Sovren has improved customer satisfaction and catalyzed massive business growth.

With the ease of management gained from the cloud platform, Sovren now has the confidence to actively market their matching software to customers of all sizes, opening up new revenue streams for the company. And it’s paying off. As a result of a 2019 marketing push, Sovren grew the total business almost 45% over a three-month time period.

Features that were previously untenable (because they required too much processing power) are now possible because the search function is so fast.

In line with their ongoing quest for innovation, Sovren is planning to expand the use of the Elastic Stack by investing in the Elastic Observability solution for logging and monitoring as well as is looking to take advantage of the Elastic Stack capabilities to continually tune their matching engine.

The power of Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud makes it easy to undertake a new use case—be it for internal application monitoring or search on a customer-facing app that drives revenue.  It’s as simple as clicking a few buttons, getting the data in, and hitting go on the project.