REDMOND, Wash., Dec. 8, 1999 — InfoSpace.com sees its recent upgrade to Windows 2000 as a way to continue delivering the cutting edge services its partners have come to rely upon. The company, which delivers services to consumers through more than 2,100 portals and Web sites, chose Windows 2000 because it enables InfoSpace.com to stay up and running longer. In addition, the ability of Windows 2000 to
“scale up”
has allowed InfoSpace.com to rapidly expand the services it offers to both consumers and merchants.
“InfoSpace.com expects the traffic from our affiliate network to grow significantly over the next few months,”
said Bruce Sullivan, InfoSpace.com director of information systems.
“And we are finding Windows 2000 to be a reliable and scalable platform that will be able to meet our huge business demands.”
InfoSpace.com is among thousands of companies that have built their Web sites on the Windows 2000 platform. Microsoft this week announced that 6,000 Web sites are currently running on the Windows 2000 beta. Moreover, the Windows platform, including the forthcoming Windows 2000, is used to power more than half of the top shopping Web sites, according to Netcraft, a network consulting firm known for its Web server survey.
“Windows 2000 makes computing incredibly more scalable and reliable, removing the barriers for companies seeking to move their businesses to the Web,”
said Craig Beilinson, lead product manager for Microsoft’s Windows 2000.
“It also provides a secure environment that companies need to conduct business over the Internet.”
Online sales are expected to jump from $170 billion this year to $3.2 trillion four years from now, according to Forrester Research. Moreover, Internet business solutions are quickly becoming top priority for business decision makers said Becky Splitt, Director, e-Commerce Marketing.
“We believe the number one opportunity business decision makers are going to be focused on is e-commerce,”
Splitt said.
“They’re trying to understand how they can leverage new Internet technologies to improve the way they run their business with partners, suppliers and customers.”
Companies are searching for several key factors to make their e-commerce solution a success, Splitt said. First, they want a software platform that’s reliable and manageable.
“Clearly, you’d like your Web site to be up and running 100 percent of the time, because every time you take it down, you interrupt service and discourage customers from visiting your site,”
she said.
Second, companies want a software platform that’s scalable — allowing them to expand their computer resources as traffic to their Web site increases.
“You want to make sure you can expand your platform as demand for your business grows,”
Splitt said.
“You don’t want to overbuild and overspend up front. At the same time, if you’ve got a platform that serves 100,000 users, you don’t want to have to throw out that investment and start over six months later when you’ve now got 1 million users coming to your site every day.”
Finally, companies are looking for a secure solution so they can safely conduct transactions with customers, partners and suppliers.
“Everybody wants to share documents in a way that’s secure over the Internet,”
Splitt said.
“They want to protect confidential information while providing the access to those that need it.”
Windows 2000 is designed to meet all of these needs, providing businesses with a way to rapidly exploit new ways of doing business on the Internet. The architecture underlying Windows 2000 ensures minimum failures so the operating system will be up and running longer, while offering more consistent performance.
Windows 2000 is also designed to scale up to handle the capacity required of even the largest Web sites. For example, a Web site powered by just five servers running Windows 2000 can handle 500 million daily Web page hits per day. Companies can simply add new servers as traffic increases to their Web sites. And if a problem occurs with one server, the load will be automatically redistributed to other servers, so customers won’t experience an interruption.
Windows 2000 allows users of different mobile devices to take advantage of the Internet, and it includes expanded security features to ensure that companies can conduct Internet transactions free of risk. For example, it includes advanced techniques for identifying who is accessing a company’s computer system. It also includes features that allow IT managers to require customers to use a digital
“key”
to access select data on the Internet.
Personable.com, an Application Service Provider (ASP) that offers software applications over the Web to customers on a subscription basis, chose Windows 2000 because of the extended features that make the operating system easy to manage.
“The increased granularity and manageability of Windows 2000 is essential to our undertaking at Personable.com,”
said Benjamin Chou, president of Personable.com.
“These capabilities give us, as the first consumer software ASP, the assurance that our customers will have the computing power they need when they need it.”
Once Windows 2000 hits retail store shelves early next year, it will motivate even more businesses to expand their operations to the Web, said Craig Beilinson.
“Windows 2000 is designed to make it easy for customers to adapt both their internal and external business processes to the Internet — and an Internet-enabled company can serve its customers faster and form more efficient relationships with its suppliers,”
he said.
