Smart Touch Technologies is a Romanian deep tech company building an intelligent document processing platform that transforms the way organizations exchange data. Since its founding in 2020, the company has already built a solid customer base and successfully closed a seed funding round at the end of 2022.
From the beginning, the Smart Touch Technologies team knew that being able to scale with load was a key asset for their application. This requirement led them to develop the application on a cloud-native architecture. To reduce the efforts of their DevOps engineers, the engineering team chose to deploy various software services in the cloud using a managed Kubernetes Engine. This approach allowed the team to focus on delivering value to customers and offload much of the infrastructure work to cloud services.
Digging deeper into the realm of artificial intelligence, Smart Touch Technologies sought to seamlessly integrate Google's newly released Vertex AI platform. The service promised to streamline management of custom machine learning models, but early documentation in mid-2021 presented challenges.
“Managing the lifecycle of multiple machine learning models is challenging from a technical perspective, and integrating these operations into Vertex AI wasn't very smooth. At that point, our Google account manager based in Dublin recommended Europe Cloud, who have a very good technical support team,” Octavian Radu, co-founder and CEO of Smart Touch Technologies, told The Recursive.
How it all began
Europe Cloudhelped Smart Touch Technology enroll in the Google for Start-ups program and guided them through the entire enrollment process. “Participating in this program allowed us to experiment, develop, and tune new machine learning models that would normally have very high training costs,” says Radu.
The actual start of our project with Smart Touch Technologies began with a thorough analysis of our existing infrastructure and anticipated scalability requirements. Fortunately, Smart Touch Technologies had anticipated the need for scalability and embraced a cloud-native architecture from the start.
“The main challenge was to ensure seamless integration with new services such as Google's Vertex AI, which manages custom machine learning models. To address this challenge, we engaged in extensive discussions with Smart Touch Technologies to understand their specific needs and devise a comprehensive plan for seamless integration,” explains Jordan Mladenov, Managing Director of Europe Cloud.
process
The decision to utilize specific cloud services stemmed from Smart Touch Technologies' need for a highly scalable and managed infrastructure, and given the pioneering nature of the project, it was essential to leverage cutting-edge technology capable of addressing such requirements.
Despite its recent release, Google's Vertex AI stood out for its ability to manage multiple machine learning models. The strong support provided by Europe Cloud's technical team further solidified the choice, helping Smart Touch Technologies effectively overcome all challenges.
One of the complex challenges Smart Touch Technologies was facing involved a particular type of image printed on old (ancient) dot-matrix printers. The OCR engine was unable to recognise characters from the tiny dots, and this was affecting one of the company's largest customers.
“Europa Cloud technical support engineers understood how important it was to find a quick solution to this particular issue and worked closely with the Google engineers who developed the OCR engine to expedite things. The diligent work of the Europa Cloud support team in this particular case resulted in a suitable workaround being found for the issue, leaving the customer satisfied.” Radu asserts.
Effective coordination and communication with Smart Touch Technologies was paramount to the project's success. Regular consultations and transparent communication channels were maintained to ensure alignment of project goals and milestones. “Through close collaboration with Google engineers with the assistance of Europe Cloud, we were able to identify effective workarounds and ensure a quick resolution, minimizing disruption to the project timeline,” Mladenov elaborates.
Impact and Consequences
“Managed infrastructure allows us to deliver new features and new proof-of-concept applications faster. It allows us to experiment easily and focus on delivering value to the business and our customers. Without the hassle of managing infrastructure, our customers see us listening and responding to their needs more quickly,” says Radu.
On Europe Cloud's side, the success of the project was measured by both technical performance indicators and customer satisfaction. Key performance indicators included seamless integration of cloud services, optimization of machine learning models, and timely resolution of technical challenges. In addition, customer feedback and satisfaction surveys played an important role in evaluating the success of the project.
Ultimately, the success of the project was evident in the efficiency and performance gains identified in Smart Touch Technologies’ operations and the positive feedback from the customer, reinforcing the value delivered by the collaboration between Smart Touch Technologies and Europe Cloud.
Europe Cloud not only supported Smart Touch Technologies’ success in the cloud, but also invited the founders to the Google Cloud Day 2023 conference in Bucharest, introducing the company to a range of potential customers in the Google Cloud ecosystem.
What's next?
“Over the past few years, cloud providers have done a great job of delivering on-demand, scalable computing resources. Now, AI applications are increasingly demanding GPU accelerators, and businesses like ours cannot grow unless cloud providers adjust their services accordingly. Not only are GPU pricing constantly changing, which directly impacts the profit margins of our business operations, but there is also a lack of visibility and debugability for multi-GPU machine learning models in the cloud.
“We know that AI technology is evolving rapidly, and we know that growing businesses need to adapt quickly to new environments. To support business growth in the cloud, cloud providers need to do the same,” Radu said, looking to the future.
According to Europe Cloud, this is just the beginning of Smart Touch Technologies’ growth in the cloud: “Our products and expertise, combined with their dedication and enthusiasm, will result in even more innovative solutions,” concludes Mladenov.
