Copyright © 2013 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.

CASE STUDY

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VersionOne Cuts Web Response Times of its SaaS App by 50% Globally Deploying Instart Logic’s Web Application Streaming Technology

The ChallengeFrom inception over 10 years ago, VersionOne has offered its solution both SaaS and on-premise. As the platform evolved to scale up to support multiple teams and projects, grew in functional breadth, and their customer base grew globally, application performance became a real challenge. At the same time, customers continued to expect solid application responsiveness, which VersionOne sees as a major part of a good user experience. “Around seven years ago, we hit a wall and started looking to optimize our application but also for help from an acceleration service,” says Culling.

In VersionOne’s product, each individual user has his or her own cus-tom view of the application. Further, the information in a VersionOne project space is highly dynamic and changes rapidly. The person-alized and dynamic nature of the user experience along with the company’s global user base made it impossible for traditional CDNs to deliver real improvements.

VersionOne tried some solutions that claimed to deliver application acceleration. VersionOne initially elected to use Akamai. “We stuck with Akamai for a number of years using their application acceleration service, but it just didn’t improve over time in any significant way. That’s discouraging because technology offerings should always get better and better,” says Culling. Over time, and through evaluation of other offerings, Akamai’s service was also unable to sufficiently speed up the dynamic and personalized information required by VersionOne users, Culling adds.

As more and more of VersionOne’s customers moved to the cloud-based SaaS version, Culling realized quickly that legacy online ap-plication acceleration tools from Akamai and others could not further improve web performance for VersionOne’s highly dynamic SaaS products. “Our customers work on projects that have very little static information, so caching is of limited use to us,” explains Culling. In summary, VersionOne needed:

• A service that dramatically accelerated dynamic and personalized SaaS apps

• Responsive, knowledgeable customer support that solved problems quickly

• Product innovation and cutting edge technology, including inno- vation for acceleration on mobile/tablet/wireless to “future proof” VersionOne as it addresses those platforms in the future.

CUSTOMER PROFILE

Company: VersionOne

Location: Atlanta, Georgia

Description: VersionOne provides a SaaS and on-premise agile application lifecy-cle management (ALM) platform for over 50,000 distributed teams and hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide. Customers include 35 of the Fortune 100. Founded in 2002, the company has been a leader in the Agile Movement with a clear mission to help companies develop and deliver great software at any project scale or scope. VersionOne’s agile ALM plat-form integrates with dozens of other project management and application lifecycle management applications as well as community management tools.

instartlogic.com Copyright © 2013 Instart Logic, Inc. All rights reserved.

CASE STUDY

Our users are intolerant of poor appli-cation performance. The challenge is that each individual has his or her own personal view of the application and relies on highly dynamic project data being up-dated very rapidly. Instart Logic’s innova-tive services give VersionOne users fast, fresh updates from constantly changing projects. It improved our application performance by over 50% - something CDNs can’t do. Customers who come from competitors say our performance is superior. That validates our choice to go with Instart Logic.”

The Solution

The Result

At the start of 2013 VersionOne started testing Instart Logic’s SaaS acceleration platform. The VersionOne team was able to deploy through Instart Logic’s Web Application Streaming Network in a matter of hours through simple DNS record updates. VersionOne subsequently began using Instart Logic’s Global Network Accelerator (GNA), a network acceleration solution that leverages a set of unique technologies including a new purpose-built binary protocol invented specifically for inter-proxy transmissions leveraging Google’s innovative protobuf technology. VersionOne also deployed Instart’s Dynamic HTML Streaming, a new application-intelligent technology that distinguishes between unique and non-unique dynamic HTML, and saves time by streaming the non-unique dynamic HTML to the browser while the backend server is generating the unique dynamic HTML.

Culling and his team immediately noticed how much faster the application loaded over Instart Logic’s network. “It was totally obvious. We could see the difference right away,” says Culling. Performance tests for VersionOne running from an origin server on the East Coast in the United States to users in Sydney, Australia and San Jose, California showed that Instart Logic’s Web Application Streaming Network provided a 50-60% improvement in VersionOne’s application response times, compared to direct delivery from the origin server. “This is significantly better than the acceleration we got using Akamai or Cotendo, another vendor we had evaluated,” says Culling.

The VersionOne team was also impressed by the fast and responsive support. “Instart Logic’s support engineers have given us extremely quick resolution and are super knowledgeable about our configurations. We’ve had a couple of minor issues that have been dealt with immediately,” notes Culling. “We’ve updated configuration and we have not waited at all. I don’t know that you could do customer support any better.”

As VersionOne explores mobile and tablet options in the next two years, Culling also plans to take full advantage of the core mobile acceleration capabilities Instart Logic has included, such as last-mile network acceleration to minimize end-user waits. Says Culling, “Customers who come from competitors say our performance is superior. That validates our choice to go with Instart Logic.”

Ian CullingCTO, VersionOne

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