CONSENSUS

BUILDING A DEMO AUTOMATION PLATFORM

Client

Demos are critical to the buying experience. But pre-sales teams often struggle to cope with increasing demand for live demos, and growing a team of expert solution consultants takes time.

Consensus helps businesses create a more successful and tailored sales process through video asset management solutions and interactive video demos. The custom solution allows their customers to deliver a fully customized and interactive video demo on demand to each new prospect in the sales process.

Then, as an internal “champion” shares a Consensus video with other stakeholders at the company, the system automatically discovers each of their unique interests and re-configures the sales video to educate the new stakeholders in a more personalized way.

Challenge

The key to scaling for Consensus was attracting more enterprise-level clients like Oracle, IBM, and HP. The demands of these types of Fortune 500 companies required Consensus to enhance their demo automation platform with a more comprehensive website system architecture, higher-level security procedures, compliance with European laws, and features like single sign-on. After identifying the crucial role of demo automation in the sales process, we strongly recommended to their technical team that they integrate Temporal's workflow automation capabilities into their system architecture. Temporal would provide a scalable foundation for processing and managing interactive video demos with precision and reliability.

Strategy

While we supported, maintained, and fixed the existing application focused on digital asset management for video production, we were also hard at work estimating, planning, and creating a new system architecture design to replace it.

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Solutions

Technologies

Amazon AWS
PHP5/PHP7
Node.js
Codeigniter
Golang
Spiral Framework
MySQL
Influxdb
SQL
ORM
RPC
auto-scaling video
processing with FFMPEG
Elixir

Our web development company provided IT staff augmentation services to build an entire engineering team, initially assigning a system architect, six senior frontend and backend engineers, a senior project manager, and a QA engineer to work for Consensus full-time. We reduced their total dev costs while implementing a number of improvements to their legacy platform to address the needs of Consensus’ current enterprise-level clients.

Results

Right from the start, the upgrades our team made helped them eliminate the need for a costly third-party platform, saving them over $100k a year, as well as lowering their overall spending associated with servers, hosting, and video storage by a few thousand dollars a month.

Review

“We are operating at about a fifth the cost of our previous local dev team while maintaining the quality and rate of development of our products and services. Spiral Scout takes pride in the partnership and is more personally invested than typical development vendors.“