Knocking down the server room walls

Jericho by the numbers

• Jericho by the numbers
• Company set up in 2000
• Has 20 employees
• Growth Rate Exceeded 30 per cent year-on-year
• Design and delivery specialist for millions of customer emails each month
• The new 'on-demand' infrastructure has boosted capacity 500 per cent

"Jericho's hardware infrastructure is now more advanced than any known NZ competitor. Within six months of implementation we have increased capacity by 500 per cent and have begun to attract many of New Zealand's largest email senders."

Integral Technology Group's utility computing solution for email design and delivery specialist Jericho took the top prize at the 2007 IBM Business Partner Awards.

Sometimes what's good for big business can also be good for small. The IT model called 'on-demand computing', where companies lease computing resources rather than owning the hardware themselves, has typically been the preserve of large companies. It's now finding a home among small to medium business too.

Take Jericho, an Auckland agency specialising in email design and delivery management with 20 staff. Since it adopted the on-demand model it has cut the time taken to set up a large new customer from months to days and dramatically lifted its capacity to handle client information.

What is on-demand computing? Rather than own or lease computer hardware on which to run its SmartMail email marketing software, Jericho pays for as much processing power as is it needs to cope with customer demand. And instead of acquiring new servers to handle greater volumes of email, it can add capacity almost as simply as increasing the flow of a tap..

Jeff Mann, Jericho's managing director, says this 'utility' computing approach has increased the company's email-handling capacity by 500 per cent.

The company has hundreds of customers that include the likes of Telecom, Ezibuy, Air New Zealand Holidays and numerous finance houses, whose combined email volumes run to millions of messages a month which Jericho despatches on either a self-service or full-service basis.

In a market with significant competitors, Jericho now has a vital competitive advantage. "We have for some time experienced high demand from clients with some of the biggest loyalty email databases in the country," Mann says. "However prior to rolling out the new utility model we found we couldn't move to their requirements quickly enough."

That prompted a search for alternatives to the traditional server-hosted infrastructure. The company looked overseas but, because of the enormous email volumes involved, and the complexity it wanted to find a local provider to maximise service efficiency.

Jericho found itself talking to Integral Technology Group, an IBM partner, at the suggestion of IBM. "We started a process of discussion. We didn't quite realise we were going to be [on-demand] guinea pigs until we were three-quarters of the way into planning the implementation phase.

"Typical! But that's okay -- we're used to riding that edge of innovation. So we climbed aboard recognising there were going to be some unknowns and we would need to work together with Integral as one team."

When Jericho went to the market with a request for proposal, it was aware of utility computing as a new data processing model. But it didn't know any examples of local organisations that had implemented it.

"Integral recommended an innovative solution that had never previously been brought to us; however we developed faith in their ability to meet our requirements, and as a result really bought into the partnership."

Mann says it took considerable commitment on both sides to pull it off.

"What made it successful was that both companies committed dedicated teams to the project who challenged each other on every aspect of the technical and business solution until we felt confident we could move forward with the solution."

At the outset, Jericho had no idea it would involve so much toil. But as the project progressed, we became convinced that if the combined efforts of the two teams couldn't make it work, there was little chance anyone else could either. "We knew they had the motivation, enthusiasm and technical capability and we had conviction and client demand and a great deal of technical expertise on our side as well."

While it sounds like Jericho was betting the business on the project, the company did have its existing infrastructure to fall back on. But it also knew that to expand the business and gain an advantage over its competitors, without purchasing a large traditional server setup, it had to try on-demand computing.

"The results so far have been quite extraordinary," Mann says. "Jericho's hardware infrastructure is now more advanced than any known NZ competitor. Within six months of implementation we have increased capacity by 500 per cent and can now service New Zealand's largest email senders."

Combining Jericho's unique email design and delivery management services with Integral's utility computing facility's enterprise-level servers and storage system means Jericho can now provide faster more reliable services than competitors using traditional server infrastructures and computing models.

And if the spike in demand is greater than Jericho has capacity for, extra processing capacity can be provisioned from Integral for a day or two, or however long it's needed. And just like the power meter that shows how much electricity a consumer is using, the company can monitor its processing consumption.

"For us utility computing is about providing competitive advantage to a business that is in growth mode, who has the confidence about where it is going and wants a simple and fast mechanism to cope with ongoing infrastructure demands," Mann says.

Jericho, which was launched in 2000 and has consistently achieved growth rates of 30 plus per cent year on year, is clearly such a business.

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