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Managed Services Case Study
Altegris Partners with Pointivity to Maintain Strong Customer Relationships By Deploying A Reliable Microsoft Internet Infrastructure
Altegris Investments, Inc., based in La Jolla, California, is a financial services company that specializes in finding unique alternative investments, including hedge funds and managed futures, to help high net-worth and institutional investors diversify their investment portfolios. Altegris uses the Internet as one of its primary vehicles through which it interacts with customers.
Business Challenge
Keeping the various Altegris Web sites and online customer interfaces operating at all times is absolutely mandatory. “If our customer-facing Web servers, or our back end data servers go down, we quickly lose credibility,” said John Cutsinger, Director of Information Technology for Altegris. “It’s something that a company in our business simply cannot afford.”
The company has always had to ensure customers’ ability to retrieve information on alternative investments at all hours of the day. But soon after moving to new offices in 2006, Altegris realized it needed to take extra measures to ensure this mission.
“In the new building, we did not have sufficient cooling or reliable power for our servers,” Cutsinger said. “We experienced several temporary Web site outages due to overheating and power failure, so we began to research alternatives for creating a more redundant and reliable network infrastructure to insure customers’ continuous online access.”
At the same time, Altegris was utilizing an off-site co-location facility for its Web servers. While in the process of rolling out new web applications to its customers, Altegris realized that is then-existing hosting company could not provide the reliability Altegris needed for the new applications. These applications offered improved features that Altegris expected to help attract and retain additional customers.
“Our previous infrastructure had several single points of failure,” Cutsinger said. “We needed a higher level of redundancy.”
Business Solution
In looking for a partner to help build more reliable Web and production infrastructures, Altegris immediately turned to Pointivity, which Altegris had partnered with on a regular basis for general network-infrastructure support and solution-design services. Altegris decided it was time to expand this relationship.
Altegris turned to Pointivity for the needed expertise that it did not possess internally. According to Cutsinger, “we had expertise in application development and end-user support, but we realized it made sense to turn to Pointivity for more help in building and supporting a reliable infrastructure and Web interface for our customers, and for strengthening our firewall to keep our internal network safe.”
Pointivity helped Altegris design and deploy a new network infrastructure that included Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Global Technology Associates GT2000 firewall software.
Pointivity also recommended that Altegris physically move its servers to an off-site, hosted data center - American Internet Services (AIS). Pointivity is also a partner with AIS, which provides physical rack space for servers in a secure data center. The data center is earthquake proof and has two back-up generators in case primary electrical power is lost. At AIS, Pointivity provides server monitoring services while also offering on-going help desk support to the Altegris IT staff. “This allows us to keep our IT staff smaller,” Cutsinger said. Cutsinger also notes that “Pointivity has more experience with the applications we use, so if something breaks, chances are good their experience will help us fix things more quickly.”
Altegris also relies on Pointivity as a technical advisor. “Pointivity is one of the best technology partners I’ve ever worked with,” Cutsinger said. “They know our network as well as we do, and they advise us on infrastructure design and implementation.”
Business Benefits
Before the Pointivity-Microsoft solution, the Altegris infrastructure included many single points-of-failure. Now Altegris and its customers benefit from redundancy at every crucial point, including its firewall, Internet connections, Microsoft SQL servers and Windows IIS servers. If a primary component goes down, such redundancy is designed to act as a back-up component that automatically kicks-in, so that Altegris customers in most instances will never miss a beat.
Altegris also enjoys an extra level of comfort knowing the AIS data center is a secured environment with climate control that offers clean, reliable power. With Pointivity technical personnel always on hand at the AIS data center, Altegris knows that Pointivity is always close by if a server issue arises.
Another way that Altegris benefits from Pointivity’s expertise is Pointivity’s ability to design an infrastructure featuring network load balancing (NLB) and a demilitarized zone (DMZ) firewall. “NLB allows us to shift utilization from one Web server to another or from one SQL server to another when we have an influx of customer activity,” Cutsinger said. “Pointivity designed the proper infrastructure we needed to create a reliable and safe Internet presence, including a firewall that prevents hackers from penetrating our internal network through our Web servers.”
These features not only allow the internal Altegris Information Technology staff to focus more attention on immediate help desk concerns for system end-users, but also allow Altegris to more efficiently manage the relationship between Pointivity and Altegris senior management.
As for the ultimate ROI of the Pointivity solution, Cutsinger states: “We present a public face to our customers 24/7. Our business is predicated on the perception our customers have of us. If our Web site or our back-end servers go down while customers try to do business with us, their perception of our company will decrease significantly.”
“But with the help of Pointivity’s expertise and Microsoft’s technology, we now have a much higher level of confidence that our customers will get the information they seek – every time they visit our Web site. And that’s what will help keep our business going strong.”