The world’s largest personal computer seller, developing and providing a wide variety of hardware, software, and related services, was running its various internal and external-facing applications on a Smart Content Platform that had become a genuine bottleneck. Response times stretched to 7 seconds, and throughput was capped at just 70 KB per second, a combination that was actively hurting the customer experience across the business. The existing search engine was tightly coupled with other applications, which made it difficult to improve or enhance any single feature without undertaking a complete overhaul of the architecture and design. That rigidity had real consequences: a high accumulation of backlog requests and dissatisfied business stakeholders who were waiting on improvements that the platform simply couldn’t support. On top of that, the existing RWS cloud environment carried multiple issues with scalability, stability, throughput, and cost, issues that were only getting more expensive to ignore.
Ascendion’s engineering team enhanced the search capabilities and end-user experience, improving the process for publication and stability of the existing logic behind the platform’s product expansion process, starting with rearchitecting the entire search engine platform to a modern, efficient, cloud-based architecture on AWS.
The solution used AWS CloudFront to enable rapid rate delivery for content, while autoscaling provided steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible price point. Ascendion also improved the search engine’s agility by applying the single responsibility principle, with enhanced Boolean logic implementation strengthening the overall platform’s maintainability for the long run.
Tech Stack:
Delivered $2.6 million in savings over 5 years.
Achieved a 30% cost saving by transitioning from RWS Cloud to AWS.
Enabled a 60x faster experience for users.
Increased throughput by 8x per day.
