In the News | 2009

June 30, 2009
CMS Wire

FatWire Turns to Open Source to Improve Scalability in Personalization, Analytics Products

Author: Irina Guseva

FatWire is back in the news. These folks have been busy lately. In between "rescue" plans and moves towards worldwide "domination," the web content management vendor also had some time to work on two new releases — Engage 7.5 (content targeting) and Analytics 2.5 (content optimization) — which bring major architectural changes involving open source-based technology.

(Extremely) Scaling It
Both releases work in integration with the FatWire Content Server web content management platform. According to FatWire, the vendor is following the latest marketing trends that are embossed with a common scalability mantra:

• Scalability in terms of numbers of dynamic page views delivered and number of impressions analyzed
• Scalability required to support marketing platforms of the future.

FatWire Personalization Features
FatWire Engage uses a “sophisticated rules engine” to create customer segments and assign targeted content to be delivered to each segment. This gives marketers an opportunity to identify visitors as part of a segment based on either explicit data about the user, their behavior on the website, or a combination of the two.

According to the vendor, with FatWire Engage 7.5, they aim to support up to 2B dynamic page views per month per install.

FatWire Analytics Features
FatWire Analytics package enables marketers to understand the effectiveness of their content so that it can be further optimized. One interesting development in this new release is changes to the underlying product’s architecture.

Using the open source Apache Hadoop-based technology framework based on the Map-Reduce algorithm (which was also implemented in Apache Hadoop), FatWire is shifting from vertical to horizontal scalability and scale up to 100M hits per day per install. The potential can really be unlimited, theoretically speaking.

“FatWire is the leader in scalable delivery of dynamic and targeted websites,” said Yogesh Gupta, FatWire president and CEO. “But we are not resting on our laurels. We are constantly innovating…”

In this WCM market, innovation is key. Granted, FatWire is not alone in creating innovation and there are competitors out there doing something similar. At the end of the day, it is all about what the customer needs and which product is the closest match in meeting those business requirements.