September 2007 Innovations in Infrastructure: What you Don't See at StrikeIron
Quote of the Month
"As mashups come of age as business tools, enterprises need access to premium
data and tools to help them create value-added applications... StrikeIron is
well-positioned as an established provider of premium data to help business
users embrace this growth. Together, StrikeIron and IBM are incubating the
mashup ecosystem."
-Rod Smith, IBM vice president, Emerging Internet Technology
Note from the President
What's New in Web Services?
StrikeIron in the News
Partner Spotlight
Events
Note from the President: Innovations in
Infrastructure--What you Don't See at StrikeIron
StrikeIron has several areas of innovation focus that are highly visible. This
includes novel Web services ranging from live financial and business
demographics, to useful business functionality such as text-to-voice and SMS
notificiation services. We have built drag-and-drop universal clients for Web
services in Excel. We have done integrations for several third party
applications such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Outlook, IBM technologies, and
many others. We continue to improve upon a sophisticated billing and usage
metering engine that enables both our integration partners and data suppliers
to receive usage-based compensation in a timely and automated fashion. We also
strive to build an interactive and rich user experience for our customers and
site visitors. And of course, there is much more innovation to come in each of
this areas later this year and beyond.
However, we also spend a lot of time, effort, and resources on our internal
infrastructure. First, a shared infrastructure model like StrikeIron's is great
for business as it allows infrastructure and uptime monitoring to be shared
across tens of thousands of stakeholders. For example, if the power goes out in
your subdivision, one of your neighbors might have reported the problem to the
electric company and the issue might be resolved before you come home from
dinner and even notice. This is one of the nice benefits of a shared
infrastructure resource model.
Yet, we don't want to wait until a customer notifies us of a difficulty before we
cut into action. We proactively make major investments in redundant servers,
load balancing technology, database redundancy, eliminating single points of
failure including electrical, and other forms of redundancy and failover to
prevent failure and performance degradation. In addition, we
have built our own monitoring technology which enables us to check the health
of our system and the responsiveness of individual Web services and data
sources from multiple points around the globe on a minute-by-minute basis.
Should the slightest hint of a problem arise, members of our technical team are
alerted in multiple ways, including our own SMS notification services. This
enables us to provide immediate response to resolve these issues. Customers that have been with us for awhile know we have a great track record of
uptime and rarely have unplanned outages because we invest so much in
staying ahead of the infrastructure curve.
So while innovation that you can see often comes with a wow factor, we know
that the investments and innovation that we put have into our infrastructure
both historically and moving forward is a major component of our success as
well as our customers' success. Without gaining a reputation for reliability
and trust, the rest of it doesn't matter.
Bob Brauer
President and CEO, StrikeIron
What's New in Web Services?
Gale Group Business Information:
Get standard financial and corporate information for 440,000 U.S. and
international companies.
<Gale Group Business Information>
StrikeIron Reverse Residential Lookup:
Based on a residential name, address and phone information, this Web service
verifies and appends personal information such as name, address, head of
household, dwelling type, length of residency, homeowner probability, new
connection information and more.
<Reverse Residential Lookup>
StrikeIron in the News
StrikeIron Continues to Expand Web Services Marketplace by Adding New Financial Data Services
On-Demand Integration of financial news and historical stock options data available for rapid deployment into Web sites and business applications
<Finance>
StrikeIron Delivers Premium Data Web Services via IBM QEDWiki
Web 2.0 technologies provide enterprises with the tools and data needed to create business-focused mashup applications
<QEDWiki>
eWeek: StrikeIron Does the Mashup with IBM's Wiki Tool
Some consider the QEDWiki mashup to be a prime example of how Web 2.0
technologies could be used in the enterprise.
<eWeek>
InfoWorld: StrikeIron, IBM Partner on Enterprise Mashups
StrikeIron and IBM are partnering to deliver more than 100 data services from
StrikeIron to IBM's enterprise mashup maker, QEDWiki. <Infoworld>
InternetNews.com: IBM's QEDWiki Adds 'Data as a Service'
The deal adds seven of StrikeIron's data services as widgets on IBM's Mashup
Hub. From there, users can drag and drop the data into IBM's QEDWiki, a
browser-based framework for creating mashups or links between different
Web-based information sources.
<InternetNews>
Partner Spotlight:
Midnight Trader
Midnight Trader Financial News Web Service provides on demand access to a wide
array of real-time and historical stock news, research and historical event
reaction information related to the U.S. stock market. For more information on
this web service check out
<Midnight Trader>.
Midnight Trader is the premier source of real time pre-market and after-hours
US equity trading analysis, news and information. They provide institutional
and active retail investors with real-time trading news and analysis related to
the extended-hours markets. Midnight Trader offers its extended-hours news and
data products to institutional and retail investors, online brokers, financial
portals, institutional equity research desks and other financial service firms.
With over 100 institutions and thousands of individual users as customers,
Midnight Trader is the leader in pre- and post-market trading support and
information. For more information on what Midnight Trader's products and
services can do for your business check out
<www.midnighttrader.com>.
StrikeIron Integrated with Sun NetBeans! We're
looking for developers to show off their applications built in Netbeans
NetBeans IDE 6.0 comes prepackaged with a set of popular StrikeIron web
services. You can access them by switching to the Services window, expanding
the Web Services node, and opening the StrikeIron Services node. To see a demo
of how to integrate a StrikeIron service, view the tutorial at:
<Sun Netbeans 6.0 Beta>.
We're looking for customers to show off their Netbeans applications. For
more information, contact developer@strikeiron.com
Events:
Join us at Online Marketing World
Bob Brauer is speaking at Online Marketing World October 3-5 in San Francisco.
See his panel on "Integrating Social Networks and Other Disruptive Elements".
<Online Marketing World>