Endorse Revamps Mobile App on ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud: A Case Study
Customer: Endorse Industry: ecommerce Location: San Mateo, CA
BUSINESS DESCRIPTION Endorse is a free mobile app for ios and Android that gives shoppers 10% to 100% cash back for staying loyal to their favorite brands. No coupons to clip, no bar codes to scan; users simply upload receipts and get rewarded. BUSINESS CHALLENGES Endorse relies on optical character recognition (OCR) to extract text from shopper receipts. OCR is a processorintensive, calculation-based technology involving pixel-by-pixel image processing and mathematical formulas. In other words, the Endorse app simply doesn t work in the average, overprovisioned cloud. Like most commodity cloud vendors, Endorse s legacy provider allocated adequate storage and memory, but overprovisioned processor capacity. Starved of CPU, Endorse s cloud performed poorly under OCR s high CPU demand. Adding to the frustration, their service provider experienced three major network outages in under two years and had asked Endorse to shut down their servers for hardware maintenance on multiple occasions.
Objectives leverage a reliable, scalable network avoid restrictive bandwidth bottlenecks eliminate cloud services that starve processor combine the resource scalability of a cloud with the reliability of colocated hardware
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY Erik Klein, Endorse s Co-Founder and CTO, learned about ServerCentral through his longtime friend and the Director of Networking at Dropbox, Colin Corbett. Corbett was enthusiastic about ServerCentral s network and data centers being the best he s ever seen, adding that ServerCentral is the least likely to go down of any service provider based on historical data alone. After exploring his options, Klein was confident that ServerCentral had the best platform for Endorse. When my longtime friend the guy who helped design the networks for YouTube and PayPal said ServerCentral s data centers and IP backbone are the most impressive he s ever seen, I trusted him implicitly. Erik Klein Co-Founder and CTO of Endorse
SOLUTION DESCRIPTION Endorse deployed ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud with dedicated hardware cores, accelerated storage, and redundant, 10-Gbps connectivity. Specifically, the deployment included: custom package of ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud Python for backend, OCR product-level data mysql for relational database management Nginx for SSL load balancing between web servers Unix VMs BENEFITS The reliability of ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud streamlines troubleshooting for Endorse. Since issues likely don t originate in ServerCentral s infrastructure, problems are generally software-related and much easier for Endorse s team to isolate. When Endorse needs help, they are automatically routed to ServerCentral s high-level support staff who provide thorough, effective answers the first time around. System integration is much easier for Klein and his team because they re able to control each virtual machine like a physical server that they actually own. Endorse will continue to grow on ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud, eventually incorporating hybrid interconnectivity with dedicated servers, hardware firewalls, hardware load balancers, and other colocated equipment.
Results Endorse has successfully processed hundreds of thousands of shopper receipts on ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud Endorse continues to scale seamlessly, adding more customers and processing power each month performance issues with CPU overprovisioning (common in most cloud infrastructures) are eliminated by ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud s dedicated hardware cores Endorse has maintained 100% uptime on ServerCentral Enterprise Cloud since day one, even during hardware maintenance To get started with a ServerCentral cloud, visit: www.servercentral.com/products/enterprise-cloud/
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