2012 has been another amazing year for Spark::red ATG Oracle Commerce Hosting!

  • We’ve more than doubled the number of happy clients we host, including multiple international clients, and several clients on the IR500 and/or Fortune 1000 lists
  • We’ve opened a great new office in Chelmsford, MA
  • We’ve been certified as a PCI Level 1 Version 2 compliant managed service provider
  • We’ve made a number of great hires, and are really proud of our team
  • We have two international clients hosted in our European data center
  • We’ve enhanced our standard Hosting Package to include a private SFTP server, New Relic, and many other great new features and tools
  • We have hundreds of dedicated servers around the world, most of which have smoking-fast Intel SandyBridge CPUs, delivering amazing performance per core
  • We’ve partnered with some wonderful new technology companies including CloudFlare and New Relic, so we can deliver superior services to our clients
  • We’ve discontinued our consulting, and are now 100% focused on ATG Oracle  Commerce Hosting

It has been a very exciting year for us. We’ve more than doubled our hosting practice, eliminated non-hosting related consulting, more than doubled our revenue, and improved our team with some remarkable new hires.  Once again, we enjoyed a flawless Black Friday and Cyber Monday with all of our clients taking advantage of 100% uptime and unparalleled performance (many of our clients had record breaking days), without needing to worry about their site’s stability or speed.

Clients

  • 125% increase in a number of clients
  • Signed our first international clients

Geography of Spark::red Clients in 2012

  • 2 more clients from the Top 500 US Online Retailers list

 “Spark::red have been excellent partners to Sur La Table in helping us to achieve all of our business goals. We’re seeing substantial levels of improvement in site speed, app performance and uptime, tickets are resolved extremely quickly and we’re very pleased with the flexibility of the Spark::red team to work with us in ways that work best for us. No other provider gave us the same level of comfort.”

– Kevin Ertell, Vice President of E-commerce at Sur La Table

“We struggled for years to find a hosting service that would provide the reliability our site requires at a price we can afford. Moving to Spark::Red solved both of those needs and now we have more than just an e-commerce hosting service; we have a true technology partner.”

– Paul E. Hoffman, Chief Operating Officer

Partners

  • 4 new web performance optimization partners
New Relic an on-demand web application performance management solution that lets application development and deployment teams combine real-user monitoring with server monitoring and deep, app-level visibility inside production Ruby, PHP, Java, Python, JRuby or .NET apps deployed in a cloud or in a datacenter.

New Relic provides performance metrics for all user request as well as application monitoring, troubleshooting, root cause diagnosis, and production Java thread profiling. In addition, New Relic provides pro-active planning tools such as alerts, capacity planning, scalability analysis, database usage analysis, Apdex scoring, and deployment history. More than 25,000 customers around the world use New Relic to ensure superior service for their critical apps.
Limelight Networks is a global leader in digital presence management and delivery. It provides a full suite of delivery services designed to enable the richest media experiences on the web.

With its own dedicated fiber-optic infrastructure and connections to more than 950 last-mile networks around the world, Limelight Networks has the ability to drive high-performance media playback for audiences everywhere.

Through partnering with Limelight, Spark::red offers Limelight Deliver and Acceleration services that are designed to accelerate rich media delivery to huge audiences and enhance their engagement with the content. As a result you can reduce the load on your own infrastructure while increasing website performance and revenue.
CloudFlare is the website performance and security company. With a global network of 23 data centers at the most strategic points of the Internet, CloudFlare delivers enterprise-level performance and security to more than half a million websites around the world.

Blocking attacks at the network edge, CloudFlare keeps your website safe from threats, including DDOS. Using its distributed network, CloudFlare speeds up websites through static asset delivery, web content optimization and dynamic content acceleration.

CloudFlare was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, named the Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company of the Year for 2011 and 2012 by the Wall Street Journal, and ranked among the world’s 50 most innovative companies of 2012 by Fast Company.
DigiCert provides the best identity assurance in the industry, so visitors to your website will know who they are doing business with. Smart companies all over the world use DigiCert’s extended validation EV SSL certificate, secure site seal, and branding to help build trust.

Spark::red, as an affiliate partner of Digicert, can order and manage your SSL certificates for you. We can help you decide whether you need WildCard, MultiDomain Unified Communications certificates, Extended Validation, or a combination of these to effectively secure your site and maintain PCI compliance.

Hardware

  • More than doubled a number of servers and VMs

Certifications

  • Completed PCI DSS Level 1 Version 2 certification

Oracle ATG Commerce Team

  • 3 new ATG experts are added to the team
Steve Hall

Director of Support

Stephen has over thirteen years experience as a QA Engineer, Infrastructure Specialist and all-around troubleshooter with e-commerce, healthcare, financial, and security software companies. He has worked at ATG in Cambridge MA as an Automation Engineer and more recently at Spindrift BV, an ATG implementation consultancy based in the UK and The Netherlands. With Spindrift, Stephen oversaw the customer support system and development environment infrastructure for Site Builder, a page rendering framework built on top of ATG’s Business Control Center. In addition, he provided QA and deployment consulting services to numerous Spindrift clients including Tesco Plc, Bol.com, Shop Direct Group, Fruugo, Philips Nederland and Technische Unie.
Keith Herron

Director of Systems Engineering

Keith is an open source systems engineer from the greater Boston area. His focal points are systems administration, virtualization, configuration management, automation, storage, networking, provisioning and all things GNU/Linux. Keith has extensive experience in the design, implementation and support of IT systems infrastructure in environments ranging from small web systems to large scale compute clusters and everything in between. By focusing on building and maintaining robust system infrastructure, Keith helps Spark::red to provide stability, security and automation to its clients.

You can find more information about Keith’s work on his tech blog at http://backdrift.org
Ben Plunkert

Sys Admin

Ben is a Linux systems administrator with experience managing a large-scale infrastructure, most recently at a prominent competitor to Amazon EC2.  Designing and deploying systems that are both scalable and usable, Ben is focused on open source and GNU/Linux based solutions and has significant experience managing the physical infrastructure behind “the cloud”. Ben brings to Spark::red a deep understanding of server internals and strength in troubleshooting though many layers of the stack.

 Hosting Package Enhancements

  • New Relic is added
  • SFTP server is added

Offices

  • New office is open in Chelmsford, MA

It’s been a very busy year, but if anything, we’re even more excited and ready for 2013.  We’re working with a number of potential new clients, and are excited for some very famous brands launching on our infrastructure over the next few months.  We have a solid plan for measured growth, some excellent future hires lined up, and a very bright 2013 ahead of us.

If you’d like to talk to us about hosting your ATG Oracle Commerce application, or about getting better uptime and performance while saving money, then please call or email us!