RepSpark

Situation

RepSpark, a B2B commerce SaaS platform, was running a legacy ASP.NET application across three bare-metal hosting providers, with copies of code everywhere to support client customizations and an aging version of the .NET Framework underneath all of it. The platform supported real, growing revenue — which is exactly why nobody had dared touch it.

The hardest part of the engagement wasn’t technical. It was helping the owners and executive team see that what got them here wouldn’t get them there. They’d hit a glass ceiling on what the platform — and the approach behind it — could accomplish.

What we did

The assessment covered what our assessments always cover: team, technology architecture, roadmaps, and process. From there RepSpark didn’t need a hard rewrite — they needed a safe passage, protecting their customers and revenue while the platform evolved underneath them.

A Ripple fractional CTO took the technology seat and stayed in it. Phase one moved hosting to the cloud. Phase two adopted cloud-native architecture as new features and applications were developed, refactoring and rewriting along the way rather than betting everything on a big-bang cutover. Our delivery teams handled the development, QA, DevOps, and managed services, and remain a significant part of RepSpark’s overall product development capability today.

Outcome

The fractional CTO seat ran for five-plus years and then wound down on purpose — the platform and the team were in a place to carry it without us in that chair. The relationship didn’t end there. Our delivery teams stayed, and seven-plus years into the engagement they’re still building on the platform today. It has grown into an enterprise product, an entry-level edition, and two sub-products, with current work replacing the last of the legacy database layer. Technology went from being the ceiling on the business to part of how it grows — which is the whole point of putting experienced leadership in the seat part-time, on purpose.