RichRelevance Receives Intel® Premier IT Knowledge Award for Innovative Use of Technology In Serving Enterprise Class Retailers
CIO magazine award profile acknowledges RichRelevance’s use of SSD drives within cloud computing network to accelerate performance and algorithm sophistication
San Francisco – September 1, 2009 – RichRelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, today announced that it has received a 2009 Intel Premier IT Knowledge Award. The Award heralds RichRelevance’s unique innovations in addressing the IT challenges faced by enterprise-class online retailers, specifically through the enablement of previously impossible algorithm development.
RichRelevance currently serves more than 200 million personalized product recommendations per day for such retailers as Sears, Kmart and Burton on its enterprise SaaS infrastructure—maintaining 100% uptime even during the busiest shopping days of the year. The company has now slashed response times to an average of under 25 milliseconds using solid-state drives (SSDs), enhancing an already unparalleled geographically distributed infrastructure.
Most personalization providers rely on just one data center, which can cause a delay of up to 800 milliseconds in response time. RichRelevance has invested in six distributed data centers, where the deployment of SSDs ensures that 99.99% of response times are under 100 milliseconds across all partners—for even the world’s largest retailers. The resulting increases in speed and relevance of personalized recommendations safeguard key competitive advantages for both RichRelevance and its enterprise-class retail clients. A recent Amazon study found that page-load speed provides not just a better shopping experience, but is directly tied to the retail bottom line: every 100 milliseconds of delay cost the company 1% in sales (Kohavi & Longbotham 2007).
The introduction of SSDs was led by Elya Kurktchi, architect of Akamai, Hotmail and Qualcomm’s infrastructures. “Intel’s SSD technology gives our already advanced infrastructure an additional edge, enabling us to accelerate the complexity of the algorithms and computation models we employ without sacrificing performance,” explains Kurktchi. “SSDs allow us to further exploit our core technology’s full potential through the nearly limitless number of computations we can conduct simultaneously.”
“Enterprise-class retailers choose to partner with RichRelevance based on the strength of our technology and our team’s unmatched experience in e-commerce, merchandising, personalization and data analysis,” said RichRelevance CEO David Selinger. “Our success as the preferred personalization provider for two of the largest US retailers is founded upon industry experts like Elya, whose sole focus is to deliver best-in-class results for our clients.”
The Intel Premier IT Knowledge Awards program was designed to recognize and reward North American IT managers / groups who have generated best practices, driving business value and innovation. RichRelevance was chosen by the Intel Premier IT Professionals community from among eight award finalists to receive the award in the Professionals Choice category. Additional information on the awards and RichRelevance’s SSD initiative is available at http://ipip.intel.com/go/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2009/08/intel_premier_it_awards.pdf.
About RichRelevance
RichRelevance is the leading provider of next-generation personalization and product recommendation tools for enterprise-class eCommerce sites, including Sears.com and Walmart.com. The company’s suite of SaaS-based offerings, including RichRecs™, RichMail™, and MyRecs™, are easily integrated and drive a range of key performance indicators by enhancing the entire shopping lifecycle, from interception through engagement to re-interception. Built on the enRICH™ platform, RichRelevance products offer robust merchandiser control and employ over 40 different recommendation types with cross-placement optimization and a closed-feedback loop to display relevant, clearly-explained product recommendations. Founded and led by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, RichRelevance is headquartered in San Francisco.
