Software as a service (SaaS)-based solutions are critical to business development, and platform architects are at the forefront.

Aug 06, 2025

The management of technical standards has historically been plagued by outdated search methods, manual compliance monitoring, and rigid delivery platforms. As industries face increased regulatory complexity and demand real-time responsiveness, the standards community is turning to intelligent, cloud-native platforms to stay ahead. Software as a service (SaaS)-based solutions have emerged as critical enablers, supporting everything from aerospace engineering to healthcare policy adherence. At the heart of this evolution is a new generation of platform architects who are blending advanced cloud architecture with AI-powered automation to transform how organizations engage with standards. 

Ritesh Kumar, Director of Technical Architecture 

ASTM International’s director of technical architecture, Ritesh Kumar, has helped redefine the standards landscape with his work on the Compass platform. Kumar and his team have helped engineer the platform from the ground up into a multi-tenant, cloud-native SaaS solution that today serves enterprises, regulators, and research institutions across over 100 countries. “The vision was to move from passive document access to intelligent compliance enablement,” he says. “We wanted users to not only find the right standards, but to be alerted to changes, automate governance workflows, and integrate seamlessly into their enterprise systems.”

Kumar’s architecture enabled Compass to scale globally, cutting client onboarding time and supporting white-label enterprise deployments. Key capabilities such as semantic search (a search technique meant to understand a user’s intent) powered by natural language processing (NLP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) OpenSearch, transformed how users discover content, retrieving results based on meaning rather than keywords. Kumar and his team were also responsible for the creation of a compliance tracker system that automated real-time alerts for updates to over 13,000 standards, significantly reducing regulatory risk for industries dealing with constant change.

Security and performance weren’t afterthoughts. Kumar and the other architects who built the platform designed Compass to meet enterprise-grade standards with features like tenant-level data isolation, role-based access controls, and a serverless AWS infrastructure. These design choices led to reduced operational overhead and enabled high uptime with low latency, even during global peak usage. “We scaled to a massive user base with minimal infrastructure friction. The architecture just works – quietly, securely, and globally,” says Kumar.

Infrastructure costs dropped significantly due to the serverless model. Compliance monitoring that once required manual effort from legal and policy teams became automated and auditable. Organizations can customize branding and access per department or regulatory need, unlocking enterprise sales pipelines that were previously out of reach.

Beyond Compass, Kumar has contributed to thought leadership across artificial intelligence (AI), SaaS architecture, and API standardization with published research. His research spans topics such as query optimization in OpenSearch, multi-tenant SaaS design, and the role of generative AI in software architecture. These works reflect not just technical depth but also an ongoing commitment to shaping how future systems will be designed and scaled. In his 2025 paper, “AI & ML for Standards Development,” published in the Journal of Software Engineering and Simulation, Kumar explored how automation and intelligent interfaces can accelerate collaboration among standards committees, previewing what might come next in platforms like Compass.

Of course, such achievements didn’t come without obstacles. Architecting true multi-tenancy with secure data isolation in an organization transitioning from legacy systems posed considerable challenges. Building a semantic search engine that understood technical jargon across disciplines demanded custom NLP pipelines and ranking strategies. And serving heavy documents and video content to remote users required a finely tuned, globally distributed content-delivery strategy. “Each challenge became a foundation,” Kumar reflects. “We didn’t just solve them, we productized the solutions, so they’d work at scale.”

Kumar’s projects have had wide-reaching impact. From enabling compliance automation in energy firms tracking emissions standards to empowering healthcare providers with instant access to evolving clinical protocols, the Compass platform has become more than a repository, it is a living system for regulatory intelligence. The combination of AI, cloud, and user-centric design principles has earned Kumar recognition not just as an architect, but as a change-maker in the standards domain.

At a time when industries are racing to adapt to digital compliance and operational agility, Kumar’s contributions offer a model for how thoughtful platform architecture can unlock both scale and insight. Through Compass, he has helped transform a static domain into a dynamic, AI-enabled ecosystem and helped set a benchmark for what standards management can be.