Having finished a hectic and rewarding December, we thought it would be worthwhile to go back and analyze activity on Christmas day and the week that followed, as it’s one of the busiest periods of the year for our digital clients.  We compared the data from this period to our “run-rate” business.  Hats off to my colleague, CTO Brett Thomas, for the numbers.

• On December 25th, CashBox processed 3.77 million SOAP calls – think of a SOAP call as a “message” calling our system from any of our clients.  A SOAP call could be setting up an account, retrieving a customer record, initiating a refund, or any other activity.  Our typical daily run-rate for the month was approximately a million, which means we saw a Christmas day increase of 275%+
• During the busiest period on that day, we were handling a peak load of 400 concurrent calls.  Most of these were related to account sign-ups and activations, as gift recipients went online in droves. This is about 10 times our normal peak load in 2011.
• During the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, we signed up nearly one million accounts for a client who experienced a very busy and successful digital shopping season.

As I’ve alluded to in recent posts, the Digital Economy has significant implications on scalability and uptime, and during very specific periods in the year.  The wave of activity can include Christmas week for digital retail; the lead up to Valentine’s Day for online dating sites; the start to each sports season, whether we’re talking the NBA, Nascar, NFL, or any other sports league; and the first day of a large scale MMO game launch.

Vindicia is rapidly closing in on one billion SOAP calls processed since the inception of CashBox, which we will hit in 2012.  Hitting this major milestone is something our whole team should be proud of; it highlights how we support and help grow the Digital Economy.  And this looks like only the beginning.

My blog post last month on scalability generated many interesting internal and external conversations around reliability and uptime.  I am guilty of occasionally flippantly stating that Vindicia has a SLA that focuses on 99.99% uptime, but what this means in real life compared to, say, a guarantee of 99.9% uptime reveals fascinating business implications.

Here are the differences between the two uptime SLAs at a monthly level, courtesy Wikipedia:

99.9% = 43.2 minutes downtime

99.99% = 4.32 minutes downtime

The difference of nearly 39 minutes a month might not seem like a big deal.  However, if you are an online merchant that is going through a huge Christmas surge, that hypothetical downtime would create a significant business loss.  For example, if one of our clients would have experienced the additional downtime during their heaviest signup period in 2011, they would have lost over 50,000 new customers in that 39 minute span.  This is especially relevant because it is more likely that there would be a downtime during an extended peak surge.

If each customer is worth $20 that first year, that’s a million dollar mistake.  The reality is that the amount is greater because you have to account for the the lifetime value of those customers.  Also, don’t forget the opportunity cost:  all the customers you never sign in the first place because of the bad publicity.

Reliable infrastructure matters:  putting uptime numbers in the context of what clients do in the Digital Economy is incredibly revealing.

The chart below truly highlights the scalability requirements for SaaS providers like ourselves in the Digital Economy, especially during the Holiday Season.  With consumers activating devices, downloading applications, and turning on subscriptions, some of the peak scale needs for merchants don’t fall on Black Friday or CyberMonday, but on Christmas and the days immediately following it.  The graph below highlights one particular client, who saw a fair bit of revenue leading up to Christmas, but knew that December 25th and the days following would dwarf anything they had done to date, and relied on us to support their key marketing and sales requirements for the Holiday Season.

For readability purposes, this chart excludes non-USD currencies but the argument remains true independent of the origins of the transaction.  In fact, some of the percentage increases are even higher for non-USD currencies.  Just in case you wondered if this client could be an outlier, here are a couple of additional digital clients who also saw a sizable Christmas spike.

]]> http://blog.vindicia.com/2011/12/27/scalability-matters-in-the-digital-economy/feed/ 1 http://blog.vindicia.com/2011/12/27/scalability-matters-in-the-digital-economy/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BlogVindiciaSoapbox/~3/zIJLc5LSs_k/ http://blog.vindicia.com/2011/12/13/the-vindicia-holiday-twitter-program-plaxo/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:23:09 +0000 Sanjay Sarathy http://blog.vindicia.com/?p=1147

Managing contacts and virtual address books can be a huge burden.  And, given how much people move in their careers, keeping your address book up to date is a huge challenge.  Our client, Plaxo, has a great service that will help you deal with the explosion of people you want to keep in touch with: Plaxo Personal Assistant.  For this week’s holiday promotion, Plaxo is offering four FREE subscriptions to this service.

Similar to yesterday’s promotion with TuneUp Media, all you have to do is send us your email address to info (at) vindicia (dot) com.  We’ll take care of the rest!

Music is the most popular form of digital entertainment and our client TuneUp Media has the ultimate digital stocking stuffer.  For those unaware, TuneUp Media provides a compelling service to add cover art, remove duplicate songs and fix song content (e.g., missing artist names). Better yet, it plugs directly and “automagically” into your iTunes or Windows Media music library.

TuneUp Media just launched its promotion for the 2011 Holiday season.  For our 5th Holiday Tweets promo, TuneUp has contributed activation codes for two FREE Lifetime TuneUp Bundles.  Just send us a note at info (at) vindicia (dot) com to get them (first come, first rewarded!).  It’s as simple as that.

On to our third client promotion of this Holiday Season and one, frankly, we could all use with the explosion of digital content and files.  YouSendIt is a market leader for individuals and businesses who are looking for a cloud collaboration service that allows you to send, share and sign documents online.

YouSendIt is offering TWO FREE subscriptions for one year to its Pro Plus Plan, a $150 annual value.  All you have to do is send an email to info (at) vindicia (dot) com and you’ll be entered into the drawing for this great giveaway.

Tomorrow’s promotion will enable you to quench your thirst in time for another weekend of Holiday shopping.  We look forward to sharing it with you.

Sounds like a great deal to us, and here’s the link again to enter.  Another great promotion coming tomorrow – this one from a market leader in the file sharing business.

Last week, we announced our 2nd annual Vindicia Holiday Twitter Program with a great set of client promotions.  The Program launches today with Peanut Labs, a client which is known both for its social monetization tools as well as its now legendary Pirates of Silicon Valley Cruises.  Peanut Labs recently launched SurveyTool.com which provides a highly flexible and customizable market research service.  For today’s promotion they are giving away two codes that extend your free basic account to a PRO account for six months, a value of nearly $150.  Here are the details on how to enter.

• Send an email to info (at) vindicia (dot) com and describe in one or two sentences how you would use SurveyTool
• Two winners will be chosen from the list of entries
• The promotion is valid for entries received through the end of December 2011.

Good luck!  Tomorrow’s entry takes us into the world of publishing.

Digital merchants constantly experiment and test different pricing models in order to broaden their acquisition pipeline and improve customer retention. The CashBox campaign management capabilities we announced today will even further help digital merchants to drive acquisition and increase retention. Some common questions digital merchants ask us include:

• Should we have a trial promotion period for our new service, and how long should it last?
• What benefits can we expect to generate if we provide a one-time discount for leads referred to us by an affiliate partner?
• What are the A/B testing results from different price promotions and what changes should we make based on the result?

Pricing for a service faces the same life-cycle considerations as the service itself. But with the new campaign management capabilities now available in CashBox, merchants can now:

• Manage all prices, promotions, and coupons associated with a service from a single environment
• Analyze and act on the results from various campaigns run through built-in reporting and dashboards
• Work closely with partners to offer discounted services to complementary products and understand relative successes

We continue to introduce CashBox product enhancements that focus on the twin themes of customer acquisition and retention. With markets and economies continuing to splutter, those digital leaders who understand how to optimize across both will be the ones that survive and thrive in the long run.  We invite you to learn more.

For a few years, Vindicia’s tagline has been sitting a quiet sentry duty. People read it, but it seems to me to be something they absorb without thinking – like those photos with surprise objects in them that everyone looks past. I wanted to stop a moment, take a step back, and explain what Build Online Revenue really means.

First, there is a very tactical answer to that question. Vindicia, since inception and even before we launched CashBox in 2008, was about creating a platform to enable digital merchants to increase their revenues. CashBox extends customer lives while bringing tools and efficiency to our client’s marketing team tasked with expanding the paying freemium or subscriber base.  We do this with our SaaS solution in conjunction with industry best practices.

At my previous company, I personally experienced how hard it was to manage through channel conflict, as physical became digital, while simultaneously dealing with piracy. Delivering software services that delight and allowing business teams to experiment is an essential part of what Vindicia brings to life. We continue to build on the ability to leverage data, both a client’s and our entire network of 120 million accounts and 80 million unique credit cards, to help clients explore the non intuitive world that involves marketing digital services directly to end users.

But there is something larger that Build Online Revenue means. It is an attempt to capture a conviction. I cut my teeth in a world surrounded by pundits exclaiming, “everything is going to be free, man!” Even the wizened opined that the only way to build successful internet businesses were to capture as many users as fast as you possibly could, getting paid be damned.

I don’t believe that. I believe that the advertising model has its place, but it isn’t the way the great intellectual works of human history get created. The services that will be critical to us, that will move us, that will inspire us and allow us to create – they’re going to cost money because they are worth every penny – even more than their public price. Vindicia wants to be the mechanism through which the next wave of digital creation creates wealth.

Vindicia wants to help the entire world Build Online Revenue.