Jamcracker saves money with Linux (page 1 of 2)

Established in 1999, Jamcracker has built its success around managed services that allowed its customers to consume applications like a utility. Since then, Jamcracker has become the pioneer in the ASP Aggregator space, supporting businesses in the financial services, high tech, and government sectors, among others.

Recently, Jamcracker translated its wealth of experience in the Managed Services business to build the industry's first fully integrated service management and delivery application sold by service providers and utilized by customers on their own servers: Pivot Path.

The challenge

Jamcracker's original Managed Services application was strictly an in-house implementation that supported the company's Managed Services offering. While much of that service incorporated Jamcracker code, it also utilized the services of a wide variety of third-party products, making it a complex solution that required a Solaris operating system running on SUN servers.

With the combined power of this super-sized hardware, heavy-duty OS and Jamcracker's own Managed Services solution, the company was able to offer their customers 'on demand' access to a large number of business applications, allowing customers to 'lease' the use of these applications based on a per-usage billing rather than license ownership.

However, while the SUN/Solaris solution was powerful, it was also tremendously expensive. Licensing and maintenance costs were significant, and the need to run other Solaris-friendly applications raised costs stratospherically. Monthly expenses to run its Managed Services offering on this combination of hardware and OS platform placed a burden on Jamcracker's IT budgets, especially after the DOT.COM crash of 2001.

Furthermore, though the SUN/Solaris solution worked for Jamcracker when the company only offered Managed Services leasing to its customers, it got in the way of progress when the company decided to package its code into a pure product software solution. The new product, called Pivot Path, is an integrated software solution comprised of service, access and provisioning management modules that are easily shared and administered.

In addition to continuing as a Managed Service provider, Jamcracker now sells Pivot Path as a software application to corporate customers and service providers. But to make Pivot Path affordable to this broader audience, Jamcracker needed to be able to sell the product on a dramatically reduced hardware footprint—one that would provide all the power of a SUN/Solaris configuration at a fraction of the cost.

They also needed to replace many of the expensive third-party Solaris compatible products that made their solution work. Moreover, Jamcracker wanted to be able to deploy Pivot Path on an Open Source stack. With these requirements in mind, Jamcracker set about designing and recoding Pivot Path—targeting the use of Intel-based servers and Linux as basic to the product's development.

The Solution: Novell & IBM

During its development of Pivot Path, Jamcracker designed its new software product to run on Intel-based servers and the Linux OS. Jamcracker quickly found that if the Novell/IBM solution could keep up with the power requirements necessary to support Pivot Path's architecture, and yet could reduce expenses enough to market Pivot Path affordably, the company itself could leverage those advantages in-house as well.

Recognizing the benefits immediately, Jamcracker replaced its SUN servers with IBM eServer x335 servers, a high-performance, rack-dense server that features powerful dualspeed Intel Xeon processors.