Think of it as autopilot for your web servers. That’s how Peakstone CEO and co-founder T.M. Ravi describes the company’s new eAssurance infrastructure software.
A plane’s autopilot makes minute adjustments to thousands of components reacting to slight changes in environment, component failures or stresses, while trying to accomplish the mission of reaching the destination safely with a minimum of fuel consumption. The pilots are only there to take over when something goes wrong. eAssurance does the same thing for your website.
“Peakstone allows eBusinesses to run their operations in a consistent, predictable, reliable manner, allowing IT to focus on exception issues,” Ravi told ASP News. “If the capacity is available, Peakstone gets out of the way. If not, it delivers the capacity where it’s needed, when it’s needed.”
Peakstone eAssurance employs adaptive and predictive technologies to help analyze, provision, control in real-time and plan for exceptional website service quality. The company’s research scientists, renowned for their work in predictive technologies, have developed patent-pending approaches that quantify and automatically control multi-tier website capacity that until now has been addressed on a manual and ad hoc basis.
Fundamental to this approach is the unique content-aware ability to dynamically and intelligently allocate website resources where and when they are needed to optimize the customer experience. “It actively turns the knobs of infrastructure components,” Ravi said.
Peakstone provides the software for installation on clients’ servers or as a managed service. Peakstone also offers professional services to aid in deploying, installing and configuring eAssurance.
Peakstone eAssurance is a site-wide solution, and complements web switching, load balancing, monitoring and performance measurement solutions. Peakstone eAssurance analyzes information across the site from web servers, application servers and databases, and controls key components of the application infrastructure such as load balancers, web switches and web servers in order to meet site response time objectives.
“Consistently superb service quality needs to become the de facto expectation from the Internet, just as it is in traditional businesses,” Ravi said. “The Internet has been a business environment where unpredictable and inconsistent customer service was the norm. We developed Peakstone eAssurance to allow businesses to raise the bar significantly and use service quality as a competitive advantage.”
The lost business while a site is down is a small price to pay compared to the brand equity lost by poor performance or a crashed site, Ravi said. “Your site going down is actually better than providing bad service. When it goes down, the CEO notices and things get fixed right away. With poor service, you have no idea how many people click away to the competitors,” he said.
Peakstone’s eAssurance allows differentiated service levels, so a site owner can keep a high revenue-generating portion of the site live during a crisis, or an ASP can ensure that top customers get preferred service levels.
“It’s a competitive advantage to be able to guarantee a service level agreement,” Ravi said.
Peakstone eAssurance is implemented in a multi-phase, closed-loop methodology, including analysis, provisioning, control and planning stages. “It’s an ongoing process as your business continues to change,” Ravi said.
