Genius.com Case Study

"Genius.com provides powerful and easy-to-use on-demand Marketing Automation, Demand Generation and Email marketing solutions. Genius' intuitive, instant-on sales lead management instantly delivers qualified lead alerts to Sales, helping prove the impact of marketing on revenue."

Genius.com was named the #1 demand generation solution by Salesforce AppExchange customers. Over 500 corporate customers worldwide use Genius’ unique technology.

Genius is a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. Their service can be linked to Salesforce a leading SaaS provider who coined the term "No Software"

As Genius.com service is in the cloud, it requires constant availability 24/7, therefore constant application monitoring.

The situation

The application is a mix of web services, email services and instant messaging services all communicating via various interfaces and API to databases and external services. About 20 dedicated servers are needed to handle the service, and another 10 servers are required for a development environment. The Genius.com team uses agile development making new releases nearly every 2 weeks. Some of the techniques are explained on the Genius.com engineering blog.

From the startup phase Genius.com had reached an Ops team composed of 4 engineers on call 24/7 to help maintain the application on the net and to roll out new upgrades. They were looking to move to the next phase by setting up a strong Network Operation Centre to serve their now worldwide base of customers.

The Pains

• Maintaining senior engineers 24/7 on call is not the best use of resources
• Fighting fires instead of designing sound and robust architecture
• Lot of false positives while real issues get limited attention

Avonsys walks in

Genius.com looked for outsourcing their application monitoring, they were looking for a service that will fit as close as possible to their processes and methods and that will grow as they grow.

Avonsys answered their needs by establishing a dedicated team of systems operators that will monitor the application 24/7. A Secure network link was established giving Avonsys a view on Genius.com back end operations and access to the various servers, services and components. Furthermore the Avonsys team was totally integrated as part of the Genius.com Ops team.

Handover was achieved smoothly by training Avonsys team to Genuis.com specific application infrastructure and slowly handing over responsibility (this would not have been possible with an anonymous type monitoring team).

Benefits

• Part of The Genius.com Ops team was re-assigned to application development and system architecture design, strengthening the application
• The Genius.com team stopped fighting fires in the middle of the night and started to build a more robust service
• Genius.com achieved their first 5 nines after 6 months (99.999% availability).
• Return on Investment was achieved in 3 months

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