iTurf Upgrades Technology Infrastructure
Network of Gen Y Sites Implements Proprietary Database;
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 1, 1999-- Increases Traffic Capacity and Understanding of Customer Habits;
Completes Transition to Serve Facility Co-located at Exodus
iTurf Inc. (Nasdaq: TURF - news), a leading online teen network providing Internet community, content and commerce services, announced today the completion of a new technology infrastructure.
The new infrastructure significantly increases site capacity and provides enhanced analysis and management of user data. This technological backbone will allow iTurf to provide users a more customized experience and handle the massive traffic increases that the company has recently experienced.
The infrastructure implementation is timely given the record spikes in content traffic across the network, ramping holiday shopping season traffic, and anticipated traffic on iTurf's flagship site, iTurf.com, in the coming year. Scheduled for launch in early 2000, iTurf.com will serve as the hub of the popular Web sites in the iTurf network and provide expanded content and community options for iTurf users. Site traffic across the iTurf network has grown rapidly, recently exceeding 5 million page views in one day.
Commenting on the completion of the infrastructure, Oliver Sharp, Chief Technical Officer of iTurf, said, ''iTurf decided from the beginning to build a proprietary solution based on proven building blocks used by leading Web-based businesses. This scalable and integrated technology is the foundation of iTurf's commitment to customizing the user's online experience.''
Regarding the business impact of the infrastructure, Steve Kahn, President and CEO of iTurf, stated, ''What's great about our scalable, proprietary system is that it enables us to integrate the information we are gathering on the Web with the information we have from an existing customer database of over 11 million individuals.'' Kahn continued, ''The most successful businesses understand that knowing your customers and responding to their needs is the highest priority.''
As part of the new technology infrastructure, iTurf has built a data warehouse that unifies data across the iTurf network. The information is accumulated from the online databases supporting Web servers, the back-end order fulfillment system and analysis of the Web logs. The result is a dense and unified picture of users, orders and browsing behavior that supports highly detailed analysis of customer behavior. The proprietary optimization software - built by the company specifically for this purpose - ties the customer database and the Web together, allowing every Web page to be customized and allowing iTurf to understand with great accuracy how its users behave on its sites.
Along with the integrated data warehouse, iTurf has a new server facility hosted at an Exodus co-location data center and maintains multiple high-bandwidth data feeds connecting it to the Internet. The system currently has the capacity to handle tens of millions of page views per day and can quickly expand to support additional load. iTurf's new technology infrastructure, based on Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems hardware, relies on a proprietary software layer that integrates Apache Web servers with an Oracle database engine.
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