Clients

Alvion Technologies Hosts High-Volume, Self-Service Direct Marketing Application
Commentary by David Pugliese, Systems Analyst for Alvion Technologies

Alvion Technologies sits squarely in the crossroads where e-commerce and business intelligence meet. Growing out of AccuData America, the largest independent distributor of compiled marketing data in America, our original mission was to create a powerful e-commerce portal that could provide instant access to AccuData America’s extensive collection of marketing data.

Alvion Technologies now focuses on leveraging our exclusive technologies, extensive very large database (VLDB) data warehousing expertise and marketing know-how to serve as a Web application service provider specializing in Web hosting and Web sites for marketing applications.

Early in 1997, the executive leadership at AccuData decided to offer public access to our products over the Web. The initial phase of the project, which we planned to complete within six months, was intended to deliver services to more than 100 internal sales and customer service representatives. The second phase would be designed to provide limited external access, and the complete launch would be open to the public.

From the beginning, we recognized the biggest issue would be performance balanced against cost. Our customers are very experienced marketers, and they require complex list segmentation and instantaneous counts. We were confident that we could develop an easy-to-use Web application to build sophisticated queries.

However, the real issue would be how fast those queries would run. Web-based, ad hoc queries against very large databases would require consistently fast query speeds. To be successful we would have to meet this need without spending a fortune on software or hardware, or taxing our IT group with constant database tuning.

We decided to do something that was considered by many to be impossible: host our data warehouse, with its very large files and high-performance demands, on an Intel-based NT platform. An earlier attempt to use Informix failed to meet our specifications. After only five months, we designed and implemented the architecture, and had the data cleansed and loaded. Once again though, the problem was the same—query times were just not acceptable. We needed something that would give us the necessary performance and was ready to operate in a mission-critical, high-volume, 24 x 7 Web environment.

We decided it was time to look at the large database vendors. The majority of their offerings turned out to be well outside the project budget and offered little technological advantages to relieve our performance issues. The only exception was Sybase. They had an enterprise-ready DBMS, Sybase IQ Multiplex, with the technology we needed built right into it.

After a three-day, onsite pilot study, we were up and running. We couldn’t believe it! Using a random test set of previously submitted queries, which had been taking two minutes on average, we now started to see results averaging less than 20 seconds. One extreme example was a query that had previously taken 53 minutes now returned in only 2.8 seconds. Needless to say we were quite pleased. We were also impressed with the additional results that we did not anticipate: our load times were greatly reduced and our storage needs shrunk considerably.

Now, with the help of Sybase, Alvion Technologies successfully delivers solutions for some of the largest marketing databases in the world. Listkey.com delivers self-service to more than 12,000 registered users. More than 2000 ad hoc list requests are handled each day with an average response time of less than 20 seconds.

Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5407