This is an excellent example of how August created a custom WEB system for a company that made them a great deal of money.

August was approached by a dot-com startup that had an interesting idea.  They wanted a Co-Brandable Web Application Suite System they could sell to radio stations.  If radio stations could offer free personal WEB pages and free personal email to its listeners, then they had a means of advertising revenue plus they could send email to all their listeners about upcoming events and promotions.  This amounts to a lot of money.  Since there are thousands and thousands of radio stations in the US alone, this could be a very profitable business.

There idea was to create the software once, and sell it thousands of times to different radio stations.  They paid August about $800,000 USD to create the system.  In less than a year this sold the rights to the software for $28,000,000 in cash and stock.   That's right.  They sold it for over 30 times what it cost them to develop in less than a year.

Here were their requirements:

Be extremely high speed

Be extremely reliable and supportable

Each radio station was to be able to customize the color, images, fonts and other characteristics so it would NOT look like a standard co-branded package.  Each radio stations system was to have a different look and feel.

August was to select, configure and install the hardware to handle this extremely high performance system.

Allow the Radio Stations to have the free WEB and email services actually running on PopMail equipment in Dallas, but make it look like the Radio Station was really hosting it.  This would allow the Radio Station to outsource this service and not have the hassles of maintaining and supporting it themselves, if they wished.

We suggested nine  dual processor Sun Servers each with 2 Gb RAM.  We configured them into a completely redundant system, with IP rotation.  There were fiber optic interconnects, dual ported, redundant  fiber Raid disk systems for non-stop operation.   We implemented the system in server-side Java, Java Servlets, DHTML and JavaScript.  The backend was an Oracle database.

We designed the equipment room and configured with a number of environmental sensors, like temperature, humidity and barometric pressure so any variation would summon attention

August created an Oracle based Help Desk system.  They knew they would have a large volume of user requests, and needed a way to give quality service

The highest performance Java WEB Server at the time was from Sun.  However we found that as a larger number of users accessed the system, the JWS was not very efficiently managing memory.  This meant that as their user base increased, they would have to be adding more Sun servers, which cost money.  Instead, we wrote a Java WEB Server from scratch that has the identical API and security model as Sun's JWS.  Since it ran in a fraction of the memory, it meant that only 1/10 of the projected additional Sun servers would be needed in the future.  This was a tremendous cost savings in the long run.  Also because we wrote the Java Web Server, we had it have only the functionality that was necessary.  This meant it was as  fast and efficient as was possible.  Standard off-the-shelf servers are not very efficient if you have specific requirements and need thousands of systems.

They wanted to be able to channelize email, where they could send about 1,000 email messages per minute.  They investigated about every commercial bulk email packages only to find that under load they did not meet any where near their promised performance numbers.  So August was paid to create an incredibly efficient bulk emailing system.   Because we are network and Unix experts, we know how the largest email routers in the world work if you want to be efficient and fast.  According to the test numbers, we believe this bulk emailing system to be one of the fastest, and least expensive in the world.

Remote maintenance could be accomplished via secure encrypted access.   This allowed a problem to be analyzed an fixed by the support people at their homes, rather than having to drive to the company.  This was a great cost savings.

Security was critical.  Since many  Radio Station's systems were running on the same Sun Server, each system was in a "chrooted jail".  This meant each Radio Station's system was in its own Virtual Server.  Should one fail or be compromised, the others were isolated and protected.

If you obtain an email account from www.PopMail.com, when reading your email, the screen will look like the following one:

The above image if from the PopMail corporate server. Here POPMAIL, Inc. is providing direct Personal WEB pages, Personal Email and bulk emailing services.  It also has a lot of investor related information as they grow.    It handles mime attachments, forwarding, replies, address books, etc.  It is a full functional WEB email system.

Below is the same screen from KLTY Radio:

As you can see, it looks very different from the POPMAIL standard server.

Below is the same screen from Arrow 93 Radio:

As you can see, it looks very different from  the prior two servers.

At last count, there were over 1,000 radio stations cobranding PopMail, and growing.  Every site looks different.  Of course, this is just what was wanted.

Configurability

How did August make a single package that always looks different?  Years of experience.

Every object on the screen is configurable with merely text entries.  This is quite similar to RoAccess, in that you can configure and tailor it so it looks like you custom wrote it yourself, without any programming at all.  Each radio station could set up color schemes.  They could create their own custom buttons.  They could put ads and frames as necessary to give it a custom look and feel, at the same time as maximizing their revenues.

Customer Profits Come First

Few companies have the experience of those at August.  This is what allows August to create quite complex systems quickly and efficiently.  However most clients then want to take over the product as their own, to save money, and use their current staff. It's easier to maintain and extend an operational system that create one from scratch.  Especially when so many technologies are involved, and employees do not stay with a company as long as they used to.

August creates system and then trains the client on how to support and extend it.

After August created, installed, tested and put PopMail into full scale operation, we then trained the PopMail staff so they could maintain, support and extend PopMail in the future.   Now August is involved only on occasions.