OCR + Cloud SDK = KaChing!

I’ve been writing a lot about the Cloud SDK lately, which isn’t surprising given the amount of time I’ve spent programming with it. Perhaps I didn’t have much of a choice when the engineers took over my machine during its development stages. Or maybe it was the customer specifically requesting a solution that could split and quickly transcode large multimedia files. Either way, I love it now because it’s an awesome product that has the potential to save a lot of money on top of the obvious speed benefits!

While the majority of LEADTOOLS products target a specific industry, the Cloud SDK is unique in that it can be used in a variety of applications. Sure, it was a multimedia problem that initially sparked the product’s development, but our engineering crew was brilliant enough to see past the surface and create something incredibly flexible. Keeping this in mind, we designed the product so that it could be used to simplify the process of using multiple machines to perform a specific task, regardless of what the actual task was.

Our hard work during the design process paid off, since we recently handled a request from a customer that wanted to create an OCR service. We have many customers that ask about OCR, but this particular developer had major concerns with scalability. The number of documents they expected to process fell into a wide range, so at any given point they might need to scale their efforts quickly to meet changing demands. They had existing servers that were used for other purposes, but they were not maxed out by any means. Rather than purchasing new, dedicated hardware for this OCR service, they wanted to take advantage of the current server farm and add to it as needed.

Their solution was simple. The customer could write an OCR plugin to our Cloud SDK and install the Cloud framework on their existing servers. Since the Cloud allows you to control which servers will be used, how much of their CPU will be used, and the maximum number of concurrent jobs, it fit their needs perfectly. It gave them the freedom and peace of mind to use existing hardware without adversely affecting the tasks for which the servers were already being used.

Talk about a major cost savings! No new hardware to purchase and no performance hits to existing services, yet they added a brand new source of revenue. Maybe my next post should be about what our customers should do with all this money I’m helping them save…

Thanks,
Otis Goodwin