Spanish Point optimizes product development for software companies with Azure

June 5, 2025

Back in 2020, Kefron—an Irish company that provides accounts payable invoice automation—faced a challenge: lagging performance was causing customer satisfaction to drop. After a thorough review, Kefron identified the problem. They'd grown so quickly that their infrastructure wasn't optimized to keep up with the increasing complexity and processing needs.

Shane McMahon, CFO and Director at Kefron, described the organization’s core challenge with a helpful analogy. The company started out as a five-bedroom house, he said. As more and more people needed to live there, they added more and more rooms. Over time, the house ballooned into a bulky patchwork structure with over 25 bedrooms. Officially, the building still functioned—it housed people—but it was no longer well-suited to serve its purpose. It was time for a renovation. What Kefron truly needed, McMahon realized, was something more like a hotel. The company required an infrastructure designed from the ground up to accommodate growth, with plenty of empty rooms––i.e. scalability and future-ready technology––built in.

So how did Kefron evolve its legacy structure into a scalable, speedy system designed for growth and AI integration? By partnering with Spanish Point Technologies and harnessing the capabilities of the Microsoft Cloud. To fully understand the success of this exemplary partnership between Kefron and Spanish Point, let's rewind.

A need for speed

Kefron provides a software solution, known as Kefron AP, that can reduce human intervention in processing invoices by 70–90%. They achieve this by connecting to various ERPs and Microsoft 365 services to enhance productivity and user experience.

Before Kefron and Spanish Point teamed up, Kefron's more than 70 servers were operating under increasing pressure as the company experienced rapid growth and rising solution complexity. Recognizing the need to future-proof the platform and continue delivering exceptional service to a growing customer base, the Kefron team initiated a strategic review of their system architecture. The aim was clear: enhance performance, scalability, and resilience—ensuring the platform could keep pace with demand and support the next phase of innovation and expansion.

After conducting a root and branch review of the system architecture, they found that, because Kefron had grown organically, their system was no longer fit for purpose, and they needed to optimize. In addition, due to their many blue-chip customers requiring airtight security, including several banks and hospitals, they needed to do so while remaining highly secure.

The question for Spanish Point became: how do we scale Kefron's ability to smoothly deliver its product to more and more customers while maintaining stringent security requirements?

The answer was to automate the solution deployment.

From IaaS to PaaS

Right away, Spanish Point moved Kefron's product off-premises, empowering them to use the virtually unlimited data capacity of the Microsoft Cloud. This quick win significantly increased available CPU resources. Then came the pressing challenge. Kefron needed to overhaul their product while continuing to meet their customers' needs—meaning no downtime and no security lapses.

"We had to find a way of keeping everything up and running and gradually evolving them to the new version of the product," Corley said. Migrating legacy customers incrementally while maintaining full-service availability required extensive data migration planning and risk mitigation. “It was like rebuilding the plane mid-flight,” Corley said. “But the payoff was consistent value delivery with reduced risk.”

The two companies knew that they needed to transition Kefron from an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) model to a platform as a service (PaaS) model to solve scalability and performance issues. Manual infrastructure management, machine patching, and system updates would become a thing of the past for Kefron.

The overhaul included implementing Azure AI Search to enhance the search experience, transitioning to Azure SQL for relational data storage, and adopting Azure Databricks to establish a lakehouse architecture for advanced reporting. Azure Container Apps were used to manage AI components so they could scale independently from the core application. The solution also incorporated Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Functions, and Azure App Services.

Spanish Point brought a strong DevOps philosophy to the engagement, enabling automation not just in product features but also in infrastructure deployment and updates—helping Kefron ship updates weekly instead of quarterly.

Incremental innovation, real-time results

By gradually decommissioning parts of the legacy system and replacing them with updated applications, Spanish Point helped Kefron roll out the new solution to their customers incrementally. The incremental approach ensured continuous improvement and benefits throughout the project's duration, minimizing disruption in use or value for their customers.

McMahon said, "This method reduced risk and allowed for ongoing enhancements without waiting for a complete overhaul, ensuring that the investment in the project consistently yielded positive results." McMahon and his team are pleased with the result, and the evolution of the product has resonated really well with customers, too. In the end, customers that migrated reported a Net Promoter Score of 25% more, on average.

The Kefron team is thrilled to be backed by an impressive Microsoft tech stack with a strong focus on security. Given the current volume of cyber issues, McMahon emphasized the importance of security and noted that Kefron had successfully met their cyber and ransomware insurance requirements, which are becoming increasingly difficult to meet.

McMahon explained, "Even though we're a relatively small business—with a turnover of just a few million and a team of around 250 people—we're successfully competing with companies that have raised over $500 million, and we're winning business. [The result of the partnership with Spanish Point] evens the playing fields for us taking on these huge mammoth businesses."

The only certainty is constant change

Spanish Point aims to continue supporting and managing aspects of Kefron's infrastructure, working collaboratively on innovations and future developments. From an infrastructure perspective—and perhaps from every perspective—the only certainty is constant change, especially in the era of AI, with new technology in its early stages and evolving rapidly. Companies don't want to be out of commission every time they need to make updates, so having the skills and tools to modify an underlying architecture while keeping the system up and running is a critical part of any SaaS provider’s strategy.

In March 2025, after nearly 30 years in business, Kefron AP was launched in the US, with support from Enterprise Ireland––a huge milestone and a symbol of their continued growth. Since then, Kefron has been continuing to expand and grow its footprint in the US market.

According to McMahon, their next major target market for the coming year is Microsoft Dynamics 365. He said, "We've built out our stack with a connector that is native to Microsoft 365, and we see ourselves operating quite substantially in that space. While we already have a good few Microsoft customers, we're going to push on that over the next 18 to 24 months."

For their part, Spanish Point continues to focus on helping software development companies optimize their operations. They recently launched their Smart Cost Optimization Service, which uses Microsoft’s FinOps toolkit to help customers manage, monitor, and analyze cloud costs across subscriptions and services. They are also focusing on offering expanded services around machine learning operations and operationalizing AI workflows and model building, which are crucial for their software development company customers.

The relationship between Spanish Point and Kefron goes beyond a typical partner-customer dynamic. Spanish Point operates more like an extension of Kefron’s team and remains deeply invested in their success. Kefron, in turn, places a high level of trust in Spanish Point––reflecting the kind of collaborative, long-term approach Spanish Point strives to take with each of their clients.