Savvis delivers millions of e-Cards
Date: Friday 6 March 2009
Author: PHILIP ALSOP
Flexible managed hosting solution supports growing, and highly seasonal, e-Card business.
Savvis has announced an agreement to provide an advanced web hosting solution supporting Hallmark.com, the online presence for Hallmark Cards, Inc.
Under the agreement, Savvis provides Hallmark.com with a managed IT infrastructure and web hosting solution consisting of virtualised compute and storage services and managed network and security services, deployed and managed by Savvis.
Hallmark is the world's largest and best known producer of greeting cards. The company employs nearly 16,000 full-time worldwide and produces approximately 19,000 new and redesigned greeting cards and related products per year, including a broad product offering on Hallmark.com.
Consumers can personalise paper greeting cards on Hallmark.com and utilise a variety of services to make greeting card sending easy – such as reminder services and the ability to have Hallmark send the card directly to the recipient. Hallmark also offers a broad variety of e-cards, many of which feature exclusive content.
Hallmark.com is a heavily visited site. For instance, in 2008, consumers sent more than 47 million e-cards from Hallmark.com. As a result, Hallmark.com requires maximum up-time, particularly on holidays when transactions on the site are especially high, such as Valentine's Day. Savvis delivered 5 million e-cards in 2009 through Valentine's Day.
Hallmark.com is focused on providing its customers with the best web experience possible. It sought to increase control and reliability of its on-line business through a new, more flexible IT solution that could accommodate the significant dynamics in seasonality.
Savvis' Consulting Services team responded with an innovative, dual purpose IT solution that created ‘like for like' quality assurance and production environments. This included the integration of advanced testing and development services from SOASTA, a leader in cloud testing, used in pre-production environments that enable affordable, highly scalable load and performance testing of web applications and services. This allows Hallmark.com to easily develop and deliver new products and services without the risk of business disruption.
Most of Hallmark.com's business migrated to the Savvis solution, including legacy applications and infrastructure. In addition, Savvis built in innovative performance-based service level agreements (SLAs) based on customers' experiences at Hallmark.com.
"Leveraging our experience in IT infrastructure outsourcing, Savvis identified key insights to Hallmark's business needs and delivered the complex infrastructure solution that Hallmark required for maximum reliability and end user performance," said Bryan Doerr, chief technology officer, Savvis. "We look forward to building a long-term relationship with Hallmark as a trusted IT services provider as their on-line business continues to grow."
