Blazing fast performance and scalability deliver seven million web pages a day

GreenIvory LLC is an e-marketing software vendor focusing on web tools designed to increase the efficiency of its customers’ Internet communication and usage. GreenIvory’s customers are communication agencies (both traditional and digital), ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and other companies for whom the web is an essential bidirectional channel.

The need

Data is a major differentiator for web-based businesses. To make their online presence more compelling, they add information-based services that enrich the user’s experience. To determine how well their brands are performing against the competition, they analyze huge volumes of data, often going back many years.

IBM Advanced Business Partner GreenIvory LLC, for instance, helps customers use data to gain a business advantage. Its first product, MashupXFeed, publishes relevant content from the web on its customers’ websites to increase traffic. By delivering fresh content on a regular basis, the company makes its clients’ websites more visible because search engine robots visit more often and index more pages. GreenIvory’s second product, VoiceObserver, is an online service that enables its customers to monitor what is being written about them and their competitors. A third product, which gathers press reviews, is in the beta stage.

“We have about 1,000 customers on the lower-level ‘freemium’ service in software as a service (SaaS) mode and 150 customers for our top, paid-for offering,” says Jean Georges Perrin, founder and CEO of GreenIvory. When Perrin launched GreenIvory in 2007, he knew he needed a highly available database because the database would be a potential single point of failure for the company’s operations. “If the database fails, we are doomed,” he says. “We wouldn’t be able to deliver data to our customers, which means not billing, and business stops.”

The company needed a high-performance database that could process millions of web pages per day. The database also had to provide cross-platform compatibility. GreenIvory’s staff use Mac OS and Microsoft Windows, and its production servers run Ubuntu Linux. The company wanted the same database environment, tuning and features, across all platforms. In addition, GreenIvory planned to have one engineer spending no more than 10 percent of his time on database administration.

The solution

There was no discussion about which database to choose, because Perrin had already been using IBM Informix® for more than 15 years. “I fell in love with Informix because I just hated databases,” says Perrin. “Informix is a database you don’t have to care about, it cares for itself. We are a bunch of engineers, statisticians and doctorates, and these people know nothing about databases. They know about coding and they know about algorithms, but if we ask them to analyze and maintain a database on top of that, we are going to lose time.”

When Perrin started GreenIvory, the company had only one product, and 10 to 15 clients accessed the server and database simultaneously. Now there are three products and 150 clients accessing one server and one database, and the experience for each customer is the same.

“Our products can go back for up to 40 years to deliver insight and trends over a very long time,” says Perrin. “Giving data back to the customer is blazing fast. Informix has enabled us to create new product strategies, because we don’t have to care too much about the database. We know it’s going to be there and it’s going to work, so we don’t have to develop special strategies to handle it.”

The benefit

• Low total cost of ownership (TCO); time spent on database administration remains one-tenth of a full-time employee’s time despite business growth
• 100 percent database availability to meet service-level agreements and keep customers satisfied
• Ability to scale to seven million web pages processed per day to support customer demand

Testimonial

Informix has enabled us to create new product strategies, because we don’t have to worry about the database.

Jean Georges Perrin, Founder and CEO, GreenIvory LLC

For more information

To learn more about IBM Informix, please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: http://ibm.com/informix

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