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Hosted environment Kelkoo grows 4 digits in only 4 years
This year, Dedigate celebrates its 5th year of continued growth. Kelkoo, one of Dedigate first customers, is a driving force behind this success. Kelkoo manages several comparison sites in Europe, allowing customers to compare and buy products, saving money on their online purchases. Both well-known and unknown brands are compared on Kelkoo’s websites.
Thomas Sarrazin is responsible for Kelkoo’s ICT department. In his case, online presence is vital for the business.
Kelkoo’s hosted environment grew very fast, but could Dedigate meet their increasing demand? Could Dedigate grow as fast as Kelkoo’s environment?
“Dedigate has been successful in following the growth of Kelkoo. Our number of managed servers has doubled every year. Dedigate anticipates our extreme level of growth very well. Because of the high volumes of traffic Kelkoo generates, you would expect that the network also would need changes. But the network Dedigate engineered when we started with just a few servers is still more or less the same.”
While 0% downtime in those 4 years is almost impossible, how did both Kelkoo and Dedigate prevent downtime?
“To be honest, we have had no crashes in the last four years. However, we need to constantly anticipate on the growth of the environment. The concept of Redundant Data Centers (TotalDC) has proven to be very successful for us. The Global Load balancing concept offers us all necessary freedom to redirect traffic to one of the Data Centers and therefore anticipate traffic peaks. If one Data Center should go down because of a disaster, we are still able to service all our customers from the other Data Center. U ntil today, Dedigate has always been able to meet our server uptime SLAs.”
With over 1 million visitors a day, Security is a hot issue. Without giving away information that threatens that security, Mr. Sarrazin explains how they prevented hacking or and kept competitors from changing each others prices shown on the site.
“Security is not an issue. Everything possible is done and will be done to prevent unwanted access to our applications. From the start, we realized that security was a key factor to our success.”
What are the main reasons for companies like Kelkoo choosing the Managed Hosting services of Dedigate?
“Actually it was a risk to select Dedigate. When we started working together, Dedigate was just a start-up. However, the solution Dedigate offered was very competitive. In the final stage, Dedigate was competing with companies like Exodus, PSINet and IBM. The final decision, as said, was risky, but it has evolved very well and everyday we benefit from this choice.”
While the number of servers is still growing, what is the reason for Kelkoo’s success?
“The main reason for our success is that Kelkoo delivers a good product: a service that helps people shop.”
“We have also been able to select the right products for our portal. All products are in great demand by our end-users, like CDs, Digital Cameras and Travel.”
Last year, Yahoo! bought Kelkoo. What impact did that have on the organization?
“It had a huge impact on Kelkoo. Yahoo! Is a financially stable organization and offers us entry into new markets, such as Asia. Overall, it gave us a better position in the market and Kelkoo emerged as a company with the right product, technology and business model. What did not change was the growth; we still double our organization every single year. In the beginning, this was hard to realize for the people we work with at Yahoo!, but today they understand better why we are so successful.”
What makes Kelkoo different from MSN Shopping, CNet Shopper and others that appear to deliver the same services?
“Actually, several of them are the same, since they use the Kelkoo engine. Kelkoo offers a portal for price comparison. Today we have over 25,000 merchants and 70 affiliates, like MSN Shopping, Yahoo! Shopping.
What projects will Kelkoo be working on with Dedigate in the coming years?
“We will keep focusing on new products for our portal. We are always on the lookout for new products and try to be ahead of new trends. Also we will expand to other regions, like Asia. This expansion at Kelkoo will lead to new projects we set up with Dedigate.
How would Kelkoo describe Dedigate in 10 words or less?
“Flexible, Reliable, Reachable, People, Good Relationship, Technology. I think these words describe both our relationship and the way we work together.
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