This blog was last updated on March 11, 2019
Sovos Chief Technology Officer, John Landy, comments on the new S1 platform.
Businesses now need a new approach to handling taxes. With the new S1 architecture, that’s exactly what we’ve built.
Tax has changed. What used to be merely a burdensome obligation is now becoming a risky and technical part of every major business process. Governments are embracing digital transformation in the same way businesses have, which has pushed existing financial and tax applications far beyond their capabilities.
Staying compliant with tax regulations is no longer a matter of making a few changes in a financial system once a year. Governments have embraced the same data-driven approaches that companies have used to transform their businesses, and that has left businesses to face a new reality where tax is in the middle of everything–and it’s a moving target.
A new era of government oversight
In order to stay compliant, companies now need to be in constant contact with government tax authorities. An auditor who might have come in and sat in a company’s office before is now pouring through the company’s data, looking for patterns–or even letting systems monitor transactions in real time. As a result, open channels of constant communication have to exist between businesses and the government entities that are determined to collect revenue from them more efficiently and effectively.
Most financial systems don’t have the capability to keep those lines of communication open. And they weren’t built for dealing with rapid regulatory change.
The Sovos S1 platform was.
Unique advantages of the S1 architecture
S1 was built for modern commerce — and modern tax. It’s adaptable, connected architecture allows businesses to focus on growth instead of worrying about adjustments in their systems every time governments change something.
Using a set of flexible, comprehensive Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), S1 enables Sovos to ease customers’ pain by connecting financial applications to the systems governments use for tax enforcement. The APIs also make Sovos applications easily available in clients’ existing financial systems and workflows.
Data lives in the S1 transaction data engine, maximizing efficiency and transparency by giving businesses a single source of truth for tax data across systems and enabling a multiple applications to process tax data.
A rules-driven platform enables companies to deploy the most important tax applications anywhere in the world, enables the creation of adaptable workflows and makes it easy to keep pace with changing technical and compliance requirements.
Through S1, the Sovos regulatory content team can do the hard work for businesses, updating applications behind the scenes and without disruption to the business as changes in regulatory policies happen. S1 lets Sovos do the hard work of keeping up with compliance for clients, enabling them to focus on other mission-critical tasks.
Sovos has also significantly upgraded our user interface with S1. The new platform offers a single-pane-of-glass view that presents all tax information in one place, as well as role-based user experiences that deliver the right information to the right people they way they want to see it.
Reliable, scalable, secure infrastructure
S1 provides a rock-solid infrastructure that lets Sovos update multiple applications at the same time, speeding time to value and further reducing risk for clients. And when Sovos updates one application, the other apps benefit from the update as well. It’s kind of like crowdsourcing but for tax solutions.
The S1 platform delivers reliability with a fully redundant, best-of-breed architecture stack that takes advantage of multiple physical data centers. A global cloud operations team and 24/7 monitoring ensure maximum uptime and give clients confidence that they will be able to access their data when they need it and from anywhere in the world.
Enhanced scalability is another advantage of the new platform, with distributed deployment architecture providing support for all client infrastructure strategies and auto-scale to meet changing business needs. S1 is resilient; the infrastructure can support more than 2 billion transactions per day.
Of course, S1 enables Sovos to continue to uphold the highest standards of data security. The new platform is ISO 27001 certified and features 360 degree scanning and monitoring, continuous vulnerability scanning, regular penetration testing and a dedicated SOC team performing advanced detection and prevention.
Built for the new challenges of tax
Built to meet the requirements of the most demanding businesses in the world, including Fortune 100 banks, global manufacturers and major retailers, S1 is the first platform built for the rapidly changing challenges of modern tax.
In an era when governments are undergoing digital transformation in an effort to increase revenue, S1 provides businesses with an architecture and infrastructure that enables them to minimize risk while improving processes and greatly enhancing the user experience.
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John Landy, CTO
As Chief Technology Officer at Sovos, John leads ongoing product development to ensure customers have access to the most updated compliance solutions needed and that their sensitive data is completely secure as they navigate today’s business-to-government regulatory landscape. John is also responsible for ensuring the company’s product offerings are stable and scalable for enterprise organizations and financial institutions that leverage the Intelligent Compliance Cloud via the Sovos platform.
John joined Sovos in 2015, bringing over 25 years of technology and architecture leadership experience to the team. Prior to joining Sovos, John served as chief technology officer at Datapipe, where he worked on software defined datacenter initiatives around the world for multi-cloud environments. Before that, John worked as chief technology officer at Intralinks, where he led SaaS platform enhancements to provide new methods of sharing critical information across global boundaries, which culminated in an IPO in 2010.
John earned his B.S. in Computer Science from Lehigh University, an M.S. in Computer Science from Villanova University and an M.B.A. from Babson College.
