Innovations in Infrastructure – What you Don't See at StrikeIronSeptember 28, 2007. StrikeIron has several areas of innovation focus that are highly visible. These include new Web services ranging from live financial and business demographics, to useful business functionality such as text-to-voice and SMS notification services. We have built drag-and-drop universal clients for Web services in Excel. We have done integrations for several third party applications such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Outlook, various IBM technologies, and many others. We continue to improve upon a sophisticated billing and usage metering engine that enables both our integration partners and data suppliers to receive usage-based compensation in a timely and automated fashion. We also strive to build an interactive and rich user experience for our customers and site visitors. And of course, there is much more innovation to come in each of these areas later this year and beyond. However, we also spend a lot of time, effort, and resources on our internal infrastructure. First, a shared infrastructure model like StrikeIron's is great for business as it allows infrastructure and uptime monitoring to be shared across tens of thousands of stakeholders. For example, if the power goes out in your subdivision, one of your neighbors might have reported the problem to the electric company and the issue might be resolved before you come home from dinner and even notice. This is one of the nice benefits of a shared infrastructure resource model. Yet, we don't want to wait until a customer notifies us of a difficulty before we cut into action. We proactively make major investments in redundant servers, load balancing technology, database redundancy, eliminating single points of failure including electrical, and other forms of redundancy and failover to prevent failure and performance degradation. In addition, we have built our own monitoring technology which enables us to check the health of our system and the responsiveness of individual Web services and data sources from multiple points around the globe on a minute-by-minute basis. Should the slightest hint of a problem arise, members of our technical team are alerted in multiple ways, including our own SMS notification services. This enables us to provide immediate response to resolve these issues. Customers that have been with us for awhile know we have a great track record of uptime and rarely have unplanned outages because we invest so much in staying ahead of the infrastructure curve. So while innovation that you can see often comes with a "wow" factor, we know that the investments and innovation that we put have into our infrastructure both historically and moving forward is a major component of our success as well as our customers' success. Without gaining a reputation for reliability and trust, the rest of it doesn't matter. |