Million Upgrade By Striata Takes E-Services To New Level

Published on Wednesday, 08 March 2006 01:28

[Johannesburg, 15 March 2006] -- Striata, a pioneer in the use of email as a business and customer relationship tool over the past seven years, has completed a major infrastructure upgrade at a cost of over R1-million.

Storage capacity, performance and scalability have been significantly enhanced to meet continuing growth in demand for Striata's managed infrastructure services and to improve service levels to customers.

"The new infrastructure has been implemented in such a way that we can quickly and cost-effectively increase our capacity as and when required," said Brandon van den Berg, COO of Striata, an electronic messaging specialist and leader in both eBilling and eMarketing in South Africa sending more than 12 million messages every month.

"The upgrade has resulted in higher redundancy and has given us the means to conduct full disaster recovery. A focus of the project was to eliminate single points of failure and this was achieved by creating dual environments that not only increase capacity but also form disaster recovery sites for each other."

Van den Berg added that over the past 10 years, email adoption had grown rapidly with most modern consumers going online to send and receive email several times a day.

"Our objective with the infrastructure upgrade is to achieve 99.9% uptime with the ability to build and deliver messages more quickly and with less maintenance while at the same time catering for ongoing growth."

The infrastructure upgrade, conducted over four months with minimal impact on clients, included standby power provided by a combination of diesel generator and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) units, new cabling, networking equipment, servers and software.

"A strategic decision was made to standardise on all software and hardware, which will streamline our future maintenance requirements. It was a huge challenge to complete the physical upgrade while ensuring services to customers were not interrupted," said van den Berg.

Users of both eMarketing and eBilling managed services will benefit from the upgrade. In order to take full advantage of the new infrastructure, clients will be migrated to Striata's recently released Striata Application Platform Version 2.5.

With high volume messaging as a core competence, the Striata Application Platform is ideal for the distribution of time and content-sensitive information such as bank statements, billing invoices, subscription renewals, promotional offers and pricing or product announcements. Comprising three suites (Striata eBilling, Striata eMarketing and Striata eContact), the Striata Application Platform also effectively manages inbound electronic communication.

"The combination of the new infrastructure and the Application Platform upgrade to 2.5 means we have more than doubled our speed and capacity. We have spent a lot of time planning each customer's upgrade, and this final migration can be implemented easily and without risk," concluded van den Berg.