Appistry "Right From the Start" Program - Case Studies

Fabric-Based Payment Processing Engine Clears the Way for Clearent

Clearent is a visionary startup working to change the rules of the credit card payment processing game. The company is coupling a robust transaction processing engine with a next-generation "Web 2.0" front-end to create a service that drives competitive advantage through new end-user features, responsiveness, and an exceptional customer experience.

Conventional approaches to system development in the payment processing industry depend largely on legacy mainframe technology or, at best, fault-tolerant servers. However, this approach is anything but agile, and creates a steep perceptual barrier for new entrants to the market. Not only are up-front costs high, but the approach results in unwieldy management regimes and steep growth costs.

In order to effectively compete, Clearent knew it needed to look beyond "big iron." To be successful, the company needed a technology approach as agile as its business.

"A common perception in our industry is that you need to start with a certain scale to be effective," said Dan Geraty, president and chief executive officer of Clearent. "Our belief is that with the Appistry application fabric in place, we are able to shatter these barriers and achieve competitive performance and economics with much smaller volumes."

Clearent chose to build its core payment processing engine on Appistry EAF because the product transparently provides the agile environment the company's application requires. How did Clearent define agility? It needed:

• high reliability: Clearent's processing application would need to process each customer payment "on-time, every-time"

• ready scalability: Clearent was counting on the ability to first build a moderately sized, then later to effortlessly scale it as it grew, without forklift upgrades

• operational efficiency: As it would one day be counting on a large number of servers to power its operation, Clearent needed an environment that was fully virtualized and easily managed

• quick time-to-market: Clearent sought business advantage by empowering its developers to utilize modern tools such as the Microsoft .NET Framework. By doing so, it would be able to field its initial service more quickly, and respond more rapidly to incremental requirements

In the end, Clearent selected Appistry EAF because it would provide them the performance, manageability and economics they required to affect a shift in the payments industry.

DreamType's Scalability Dreams Answered

For Brian Gullette, president of DreamType, Appistry EAF and the resources offered through Appistry's "Right From the Start" program provided exactly what his small technology company needed.

"Until finding Appistry we thought we'd need to wait to tackle the scalability problem," said Gullette. "I assumed it would require IT consulting, expensive hardware and software, set up and hosting of load-balanced servers, stress-testing, etc. But the Appistry solution was a way for us to leapfrog all this."

DreamType provides a services for marketers that allows them to produce highly effective 1-to-1 marketing campaigns for email, print and the Web. At the core of the service is an innovative, Web-based application that provides dynamically generated, highly customizable images for the company's customers.

In order to keep up with the demands its growing customer base placed on its CPU-intensive application, DreamType needed to be able to easily scale the application across a potentially large number of servers. To ensure the highest levels of customer satisfaction, the company also wanted to increase the application's reliability. Furthermore, they needed to do these things as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible.

DreamType chose to deploy Appistry EAF because it transparently provides each of these attributes. Deployment of the Appistry EAF-based solution, which now powers the company's offering at http://www.dreamtype.com, took less than one week. The enhanced application immediately provided DreamType with a level of scalability and reliability unattainable by their original application.

"We were amazed to see how quickly the Appistry product was able to impact our application, and how little effort it took," said Gullette. "Using Appistry EAF, we estimate that we've avoided nearly two man-years in development and deployment costs to get to the same place. On top of that, we expect to reduce operating costs to half of what they'd be had we tried to scale our apps out using the usual techniques."

Beyond raw performance, DreamType now benefits from the flexibility inherent in Appistry's application fabric-based approach. The company is able to easily increase the capacity of its service using inexpensive, commodity-grade computers without increasing costs for managing the application.