All Transactions Saved Even During Back Office Outage.
London, UK – December 18, 2006 – Citing the results of a recently completed implementation and production phase of a new Order Management System (OMS) that proved the dual mission-critical benefits of scalability and fault tolerance in GigaSpaces’ Space-Based Architecture solution, Virgin Mobile’s (LSE:VMOB) Head of Architecture Julian Browne announced today that the organization, UK’s largest mobile virtual network operator, has significantly expanded its relationship by signing an enterprise license agreement with GigaSpaces.
“We now see GigaSpaces’ Space-Based Architecture as a key element in our ongoing strategy”, said Browne. “Performance testing went well, but even our high expectations were blown away when we launched in August. Customers started generating up to three times the number of previous orders per day. The GigaSpaces engine scaled easily, and even when older backend systems were unavailable, we never lost a single transaction”.
Virgin Mobile, which has attracted more than four million customers since its launch in 1999, selected GigaSpaces initially in January, 2006, following a holiday sales period in 2005 during which the company’s traditional application server-based OMS led to a loss of website availability and consequent revenue hit. “The decision to move away from a traditional application server approach to the far more elegant and maintainable Spaces model was an easy one”, Browne explained, “but what really appealed to us about the GigaSpaces product was its potential scalability and fault tolerance”.
The new GigaSpaces-based OMS at Virgin Mobile proved itself under fire in November, 2006, when some key back office systems were unavailable for a time. While the OMS continued running, many orders were stalled in the state of being ready for processing by the back office systems. When it was restarted, every pending order was processed.
“This demonstration, in production, by a major UK company, of the inherent resiliency and corresponding business value of our solution”, said Alan Weisleder, GigaSpaces’ EVP Sales EMEA and APAC, “validates the unique product vision we had since its launch in 2003, and have significantly and continually advanced including the 2006 release of Version 5.2 in December. Virgin Mobile’s experience and many, many others like it, explains why GigaSpaces is being adopted over all other alternatives in increasing numbers and at faster rates among leading companies worldwide”.
Virgin Mobile Website Powered by GigaSpaces Wins “Best Website of Year”
In the UK, following a people’s choice selection process that tabulated more than 350,000 votes in 20 consumer categories, Virgin Mobile’s website powered by GigaSpaces was named “Best Website of the Year” in the telco category. The title “Best Website of the Year” is given to the website with the highest average score on content, navigation and design.
About Virgin Mobile
Virgin Mobile is the UK’s largest mobile virtual network operator and uses T-Mobile’s network. Virgin Mobile is part of the ntl:Telewest group. The group is the first to be able to offer ‘quadruple play’ to customers: mobile and fixed line telephony, broadband internet and television.
Virgin Mobile employs approximately 1,700 staff at three sites, Trowbridge, London and Daventry, and has an outsourced customer service centre operated by approximately 200 staff in Middlesbrough. Virgin Mobile was voted 22nd in the Best Workplaces in the UK Financial Times survey for 2006.
About GigaSpaces
GigaSpaces provides a single platform for end-to-end scalability of high performance and stateful distributed applications. GigaSpaces’ unique approach enables developers to Write their business logic Once and then seamlessly Scale out the application linearly Anywhere, and on-demand. It is targeted at applications characterized by high-volume transaction processing and low transaction latency requirements and provides an alternative to web-services for implementing high performance and scalable service-oriented architectures. GigaSpaces customers include leaders in the financial services, telecommunications sectors, and government institutions, including: Societe Generale, Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Dow Jones, Virgin Mobile, Nortel, and Hutchinson 3G, where the need for mission-critical high-performance, low-latency reliability and scalability necessitates an alternative to traditional approaches. GigaSpaces was founded in 2000 and has offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris and Israel. It is a privately-held company, funded by BRM Capital and Intel Capital.
For more information, please visit http://www.gigaspaces.com, or visit the company’s blog at http://www.gigaspacesblog.com.
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For additional information, contact:
Alit Bar Sadeh
GigaSpaces Technologies, Inc.
Tel: (+1) -917-701-5185
Email: alit@gigaspaces.com
Dave Cote
AgencyNext, Inc
Tel: (+1) -508-647-0044
Email: dave@agencynext.com
GigaSpaces is a trademark of GigaSpaces Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.