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Overview: Online retailer overhauls its infrastructure
Kenny West did not exactly have Internet stars in his eyes when he co-founded the PalmGear.com site back in March of 1997. He and his partner, J.D. Crouch, were sysops for CompuServe's Palm forum in those days, and, due to the wild popularity of the new computing platform, the postings were getting out of hand. "We were finding it more and more difficult to handle all the questions. We got the idea to put up a Web site, aggregate all the links in one place, see if the developers would let us sell their software and accessories," recalls West, now president of PalmGear.com Inc., in Arlington, Texas. "We figured we might make three or four hundred bucks a month."
A little more than four years later, the site (which provides hardware, software, and content for users of Palm and compatible handheld devices) is the Web's number-one Palm-related destination, according to publications like Yahoo! Internet Life, PC Magazine, and Handheld Computing. It gets about a million and a half unique page views and 1,400 orders per day. PalmGear.com is the exclusive provider of software content to the official Palm and Handspring sites. Without a shred of outside funding, the company has been profitable nearly every quarter since it was founded. From a startup cost of $1,500, the site did $16 million in revenue last year.
West is a bit dazzled by the success. "This wasn't started as a business. We had no business plan. It was never supposed to turn into what it turned into," he says.
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Not only was there no business plan, there was no technical plan either. The site consisted of an MS SQL Server 7 database running on a lone Compaq ProLiant DL380 Web server and Macromedia ColdFusion 4.0 code. Yahoo! Store was the e-commerce platform. This meager infrastructure took the company through its early years but hit a wall as traffic began to skyrocket. By the middle of last year--with traffic running about a million unique page views per day and often doubling each month--a major revamp was needed. Like many an online entrepreneur before him, West faced a total system overhaul to transform the site from passionate hobby to cold, hard business.
West's plan was to migrate the site's database to enterprise-strength Oracle 8i, automate the store (so he wouldn't have to process orders on the weekend), and refresh the site's appearance. The challenge: How to make the transition quickly and seamlessly, without alienating the more than 4,500 developers and 100,000 consumers who are registered PalmGear.com users.
At the same time, West was anxious to give a facelift to the site's interface. For instance, he wanted to add Yahoo!-like categories under the popular "Essentials" link, so users wouldn't have to comb through a blanket list of software and accessories as they did previously. The old search engine did not work well. Users reported they were having trouble finding what they were looking for. With more than 10,000 software titles for sale on the site, ease of navigation was paramount.
West outsourced the project to the DPC Group Inc., a Dallas Web development firm. The first phase of the revamp, the hardware upgrade, was completed by the end of last year. Now, the team is readying the final transition to Oracle 8i, which was expected to be complete by the end of July. The new architecture includes 25 Compaq Web, e-mail and database servers; 4 Compaq ProLiant 5500 database and reporting servers; 15 Hewlett-Packard Web and replication servers; and two Hewlett-Packard LH4 database servers. PalmGear pays about $15,000 per month for the Dallas office of Web hosting firm Verado to run and maintain its servers. The company uses wireless Internet access services from T-Speed Corp. of Dallas. This was a much more cost-effective option than installing a T-1 line, which would have cost at least $2,000 per month, according to West. "It's just $400 per month and the speeds are 1.5 megs minimal, burstable to 6.5 megs." The company's 25 varied-model Dell PCs are connected on an Ethernet local-area-network.
The new e-commerce engine, written in ColdFusion 5.0, is due to roll out at the end of the summer.
The next phase of the project, which should begin in the fall, will involve a custom registration system for Palm applications written entirely in Java. "Users will be able to buy their software online and register with the developer right on the PalmGear site," says DPC's Tim Jespersen. "Actually, they can do that now but it's all manual. Using Java will automate the process and save a lot of time."
Also coming--XML support. Today, PalmGear.com not only syndicates its content to the Palm.com and Handspring.com Web sites, it also maintains those Web sites. In the near future, PalmGear will use XML as a way to "push" its information to those sites without having to maintain them. Says Jespersen, "It's a huge part of our plans for the future."
Lauren Gibbons Paul, a writer in Waban, Mass., writes frequently about e-commerce.
