Success Stories
Grasshopper
Having a professional, flexible phone system was a surprisingly big challenge for small businesses short on cash. Enter Siamak Taghaddos and David David Hauser, who in 2003 (as they were graduating college) launched GotVMail to offer phone system service at rates starting at only $10 per month. They launched their business with under $200,000 in capital and bootstrapped their way to profitability quickly, and are now driving over $10 million in annual revenue. Keeping up with that kind of growth meant being able to scale the underlying service delivery platform at the lowest possible cost, without compromising customer satisfaction.
- Customer reports went from 40-minute execution times to nine seconds.
- The Pythian solution cost only 10 percent of the original proposed solution Grasshopper had considered.
The Challenge
Successful growth and customer acquisition were putting a strain on the database infrastructure. Reports run by customers were taking too long to return and this was negatively impacting their experience. Pythian was asked to audit the existing reporting application and make recommendations on how to resolve the underlying performance bottlenecks.
The Solution
Pythian reviewed the software responsible for the performance concerns and evaluated the data structures underlying the application. It was determined that the optimal and most cost-effective way forward was to rebuild the application logic that generates the reports. Rather than executing application code, the reports were rewritten using SQL and the underlying data structures were optimized for fast query results.
The Results
The Pythian recommendation netted demonstrable improvements in reporting speed and it cost only 10 percent of what was initially considered. In some cases, reports that took more than 40 minutes to execute now return in less than nine seconds. In addition, Grasshopper saved itself the ongoing software maintenance costs the original vendor was charging.
