Re:Lycos response to the qfeed group - entire letter:
Kimberly,
Pursuant to our discussion on Friday, and as a follow-up to the email that I sent on Friday afternoon, I wanted to take this opportunity to provide your forum with more information relating to the Continuum specific work at Lycos Quote.com. In this letter, I will detail a number of topics that include:
 The amount of investment already undertaken within the architecture;
 The plan for current development projects that we have underway within Lycos Quote.com;
 A recap of the specifics raised within your original letter to us at Lycos;
 Finally, a preview of our roadmap for the architecture.
I will start with the investment already undertaken for developing the Continuum platform.
We, since our acquisition by Lycos, Inc. have made a significant investment in the development of the Continuum product (which included LiveCharts, QCharts and QFeed). This includes modernizing our Client Services department, investing over $1million for capacity, recently increasing the development headcount within Engineering by 40% and opening up two additional data-centers that will support our continued growth in this area. These initiatives are significant, and would not have been possible without the full support of the Lycos management team and it’s belief in the strength of this product. This effort also takes time to develop and implement, and some of our customers had felt the strain that this placed on our current capacity.
To date, we currently, had three farms lit up across the country and we are planning to launch a fourth farm, which will be combined with major upgrades on some of our existing farms. This will further increase our ability to support a growing business that is based on our popular product.
With regards to our plan for the future, it would be appropriate to detail some of the accomplishments that we had already completed and further detail the upcoming projects that are either under development or in the queue. The main emphasis of the current project priorities is based on reliability, data integrity and our ability to scale. Please refer to the list below for information with regards to our current plan of activities.
Data Center Transition
- Phase One – the initial move completed on during the weekend October 13 through October 15
- Phase Two – completion of deployment of services within new facility October 31st
IP Feed
- Resolve Delayed Hotlist Issue – October 20
- Boston Release – October 21-22
- Global Release – Coordinate with Operations for Release Date
Options Lookup
- 2 Weeks – October 20
- Server Solution – Roll into IP Feed
- Finish Development on Fundamentals Data
- Phased Release approach – Weekend of November 4
Database Management Tool (DMT) - Allow Data Integrity group to import/export and correct all continuum data
- Phase 1 – October 20
- Phase 2 – Timeline TBD: October 27 (end of Phase 1)
IPOX – Completed
Data Integrity - Improve data quality by preventing data issues.
- Development begins after Options Lookup Development Finished
Operations Support - Create better tools for operations to support Continuum.
- Accomplished the Following
- Messaging for Server – 100% Finished
- Client Interface for Server – 80 % Finished
- Built MMC on top - >50% Finished
- Leveraging for SiteScope – 30% Finished
Island Lagging – Determine where the bottleneck is located and implement a solution.
- Waiting for LAN line to be tested
- The LAN will be tested once it’s put in production
- Timeline for LAN line
- Waiting for Island Account to be set-up for Boston – October 11
- Once account set up, then we’re ready to test in Boston
- Sunnyvale is currently set up
- Currently working to resolve an issue in Sunnyvale
- Issue will be resolved in 2 days
- Plan to test and have this live by end of week – October 13
Again, we are paying close attention to the needs that have been brought to our attention by our customers and we believe that are priorities are the right ones. We will continue to develop this product so that we can offer the least expensive, reliable and fastest product within the investing community. This, however, has challenges and we will continue to push the technology so that we can leverage the best value out of our hardware, software and people in serving this community.
I also wanted to touch on the issues raised in the original letter that you sent to the Lycos management and just recap the items for those who may have missed the original email. Again, I will just list the content from the email below and include dates, which were not in the original email:
1. Queuing Problems: The IP Feed Server that we are deploying handles this data better than the current production servers. We are not sure the server issue was completely resolved so we will be running tests on the new code. We have saved the data received on 9/22/00 in order to replay it. Once the last issue, HotList performance, in the IP Feed development is resolved we will focus on running this data through the server and optimizing against the results. Our target estimate for the resolution is 31st October 2000, since resolving this issue may take significant reworking of a critical part of the server.
2. Decimalization: We will be releasing a fix to this for October 10th. We have been releasing new versions of the DLL itself, but have not bundled the fix into a new SDK. The new DLL will be released next week and bundled into a new version of the SDK.
3. The 1/100 problem: October 10th - This is the fix that is mentioned in #2.
4. Lack of Communication: The Network update page should be used as the source of this communication. The QFeed clients should be told about this resource: qcharts.com. However, we recognize that the best way to represent the "freshness" of the information is to simply date and time stamp each update. This will then allow our customers to review the information each hour and know that we are either resolving the issue or we have implemented a solution. This has been recommended as a policy to Client Services.
5. Incorrect Option reporting: This is an issue with the 128K feed, and will be resolved in the IP Feed deployment. Target is the end of the month for beginning deployment. Our goal is to complete the deployment the end of November, as we work with new feed in a production mode.
6. Failure of the SDK to operate as documented: This is the first that we have heard about this and obviously we will organize a plan to address the shortfall in our documentation. We will review the QFeed list messages for mention of this and would like a detailed explanation of the issue. Working with our customers, we know that we can address this particular problem and provide a detailed course of action that will bring our documentation in-line with expectations.
A number of these issues were operational in nature and therefore demanded our immediate attention. Some of the other items were already part of a formal plan that we are working with to continue the improvements of the technology architecture at Quote.com.
Finally, with regards to the future of the Continuum technology, it would be appropriate to talk about the roadmap that we have for further developing the scalability of the architecture both vertically and horizontally within Lycos Quote.com’s product offering.
We recognize that we will continue to make some changes to address the limitations of the original architecture, particularly in it’s ability to support large volumes and the large overhead that is required to manage it operationally. Since January 2000, we had already made a number of changes to the legacy architecture that enabled us to support the higher volumes and the operational needs for our product. Furthermore, we have set some pretty specific goals that will enable us to continue developing the architecture that will support increasing volumes, whilst keeping our costs down by reducing the number of servers that will be required to support these volumes.
The plan is to use state-of-the-art software techniques combined with recent innovations in hardware platforms that will enable us to scale efficiently and effectively with little overhead on the operational support of the environment. This work will be undertaken once the current priorities have been completed. This will put us into a new realm for quote delivery services and continue to maintain our dominance as a leading-edge provider of financial services.
We strive to offer one of the most comprehensive sites that offer features such as news, community, chat, education, trading and state-of-the-art streaming technology. We offer these services at the most competitively priced level within the investing community and that our customers, as a whole, recognize and value the commitment that is placed within the Continuum technology. We cannot signal strongly enough that this commitment towards Continuum is felt internally and that we will continue to improve and enhance the level of service, even during demanding times such as the one we face now.
Finally, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to respond to the forum and for being able to provide some information regarding the current state and future opportunities that lay with our Continuum architecture. We will continue in our efforts to provide our customers with the value-based service that has redefined the delivery of quote-data within the investing community.
Sincerely,
Kaj Pedersen
Vice-President of Engineering. |
