Technology Statement

Built from the ground up, on Microsoft .NET, this Enterprise development platform, used in conjunction with SQL Server, provides a robust, secure, full featured and scalable architecture. The .NET best-in-class Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and the leading Object orientated programming language, C#, allows for large productivity gains through Object and Control re-use.

This Web-based application is architected for both hosted managed service and licensed application deployments, from a single source base. This facilitates minimal maintenance and configuration. Web Services can be quickly deployed and consumed for easier integration. .NET Smart Client Technology can be used in conjunction with Web Services to provide analysis of Metrics in a rich Windows environment.

To handle the alphabets of most of the world's languages, Pages and emails are rendered in UTF8 and the database is DBCS enabled. Standard user facing pages are available in English, French, German and Dutch. UI elements, controlled by Cascading style sheets (CSS), can be easily changed so that look and feel reflect the corporate brand standards of partners and customers.

The primary deployment database, SQL Server 2000, utilizes stored procedures for the fastest possible access. This database structure allows for individual sets of tables per Marketing campaign or Survey. This prevents a large load being placed on any one table, providing greater scalability at lower cost. Encapsulated database access allows easier migration to other databases such as Oracle and IBM's DB2.

Architected to scale up -and out- the product can avail of Caching, Distributed processing and Clustering technology by allowing multiple services -such as email Broadcast and Metrics- to run on different servers with long running jobs executing asynchronously. Therefore Scalability can be achieved incrementally and cost effectively as the load increases.

In a sample Benchmark, performance increased by a factor of 5 when the Survey capture process was separated from other services, with Survey caching turned on. This benchmark, executed on a modest hardware platform (2 x P4/2GHZ/512MB RAM/100GB HD), involved 1,000 concurrent users over a 5 minute period. 13,450 surveys were queued consisting of 107,600 questions resulting in 74,765 website requests, serving 250 requests per second. The Survey rendering and Survey capture process ran on separate servers, demonstrating a robust distributed capability resulting in improved survey results and accuracy.