Shaadi.com Hosts Over 30m Users With Rackspace

Rackspace, a leading Managed Cloud company, has announced Shaadi.com, the world’s largest matrimonial website is using Rackspace dedicated hosting. Based in India, Shaadi.com manages over 200 million page views per month and over 10,000 registrations daily. 

 Beginning with one Rackspace server in 1998, Shaadi.com has grown exponentially since its initial deployment. Sixteen years ago, Shaadi.com saw an opportunity to build the world’s largest online matrimonial site and create an online experience that would match and heighten the traditional dating experience in India.

Today, 30 million people use Shaadi.com, 3.2 million members have found their matches through the site and the company has built over 100 matchmaking centres across 87 cities in India. 

 “When starting out as an online startup, it was critical that we found a technology partner that allowed us to keep IT costs to a minimum, while also providing the right IT infrastructure to meet our growing needs,” said Anand Mittal, COO & director, Shaadi.com. “We needed to find a partner that could help us build a premium online experience for our customers – one that could accommodate millions of customers and scale as demand grew.”

 To meet this challenge, Shaadi.com turned to Rackspace for its high-performance dedicated servers, which provide the processing speed required to help meet daily business needs. With Shaadi.com running millions of daily, complex personalized searches serving millions of users on the site, Shaadi.com needed industry-leading, expertise and superb performance to manage this heavy compute burden, which takes up vast amounts of power.

With Rackspace’s powerful cloud services systems in place, Shaadi.com only uses 30 servers to run complex searches and successfully match users. This has resulted in significant cost savings for the company.  

 “Since day one, Rackspace dedicated hosting and cloud computing services have been a critical component to the growth and success of our business,” said Mittal.  “Any downtime of our website is detrimental to our business, as it impacts our brand image and damages customer loyalty. To be successful and gain the trust of our customers, we consistently need to deliver a seamless experience and make sure they are happy. Rackspace enables us to do that.” 

While reliability and scalability initially attracted Shaadi.com to Rackspace, Fanatical Support is what made the company a satisfied customer for almost two decades. 

“Rackspace’s real-time and round-the-clock IT expertise and relentless customer support has been critical to the success of our business,” added Mittal. “Because of Fanatical Support, we can focus on our core business as opposed to dealing with server and network problems.” 

“With Shaadi.com’s rapid expansion and global growth, it was important that the company had dedicated infrastructure for managing day-to-day traffic as well as traffic spikes during growth spurts and peak traffic times,” said Ajit Melarkode, managing director, Rackspace Asia-Pacific. “What’s more is that Shaadi.com also has 24/7 support to help and guide at any time, day or night, a critical component to the overall success of the company.” 

 With Rackspace support, the site has been recognized for countless website awards, including; ‘Most Innovative Company in India of 2011’ by Fast Company, USA, ‘The Best Matrimonial Site’ by About.com’s Reader’s Choice and ‘Most User Friendly Website’ and ‘Most Preferred Online Matchmaking Brand’ by Juxt Consult. 

10,000 Microsoft Partners Will Help Move To Cloud

SMBs in India will now be able to purchase Microsoft Azure cloud platform from their local IT partner.  Microsoft has made this possible by making Azure available in the open licensing catalogue for India.  SMBs in India rely on products available with their local IT partner in open licensing catalogue to fulfil their IT needs.  With the inclusion of Azure, SMBs will now be able to procure their entire IT portfolio from a single Microsoft partner of their choice. 

 Cloud is a great way for SMBs to enhance their business efficiency with minimal expenditure on IT.  Microsoft makes available the most comprehensive portfolio of enterprise-grade cloud services preparing them to compete with the best across the world.  Office 365 is already available in the open catalogue.  With the addition of Azure, SMBs will be able to quickly build and deploy applications at reduced costs with flexible monetary terms and achieve faster return on investment.   

 Earlier customers could purchase Azure either directly from www.azure.microsoft.com or as part of an Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft.  While these options would continue, SMBs are likely to leverage their existing partners to procure Azure.

“Over the years, our customers have been able to adopt and benefit from new technologies though the support of our 10,000 strong partner network. By making Azure available through local partners, we are further helping India’s SMBs secure the great benefits of cloud computing”, said Meetul Patel, General Manager, Small and Midmarket Solutions & Partners, India. 

“Availability of Microsoft Azure through the partner channel will bring cloud services to lakhs of SMBs in India.  It will also help partners scale to a higher engagement with these customers.” said Nagaraj, Executive Director, Quadra Systems, a Microsoft partner based out of Bangalore, Karnataka. 

“Azure will make our cloud portfolio comprehensive and help make our customers more efficient.  It will allow us to work closely with them to solve their business challenges.” said, Kothandaraman R., MD, Katpro Technologies, a Microsoft partner based out of Bangalore, Karnataka.   

Microsoft is continuing to enable SMB customers and partners to embrace cloud as the preferred mode for deployment of IT.  Azure further incentivizes partners to ‘do more’ for SMBs. It will help them deepen the engagement with customers in identifying and supporting IT usage through Azure.  Partners will also be able to strengthen their revenue stream while working closely with customers.  

Nike & Juniper To Build Data Centre Cloud Network

Juniper Networks. a leading player in network innovation, has announced that NIKE, Inc., the global leader in athletic footwear, apparel, equipment and accessories, has agreed to work with Juniper to co-create a new highly scalable next-generation data centre cloud and retail network infrastructure.

As part of its ongoing work to meet the changing needs of its business and customers globally, NIKE intends to deploy key components of Juniper Networks MetaFabric architecture to support current and future business goals. Additionally, MetaFabric will serve as the basis for virtualizing multiple NIKE data centers around the world.

 Through the open standards-based architecture of MetaFabric, comprised of proven routing, switching, security, management and orchestration solutions, NIKE can expect to realize improved application performance across the company as well as advanced network orchestration via automation and data analytics. 

 Juniper Networks will work with NIKE to provide:

* A carrier-class, ultra-scalable, secure network architecture, providing a foundation upon which to virtualize multiple NIKE data centers globally.

* Advanced orchestration via automation, management and data analytics across all domains

* Co-creation on future developments for NIKE’s network

BJP Adopts SAP Tech to Listen, Understand and Engage with Indian Citizens

In order to deliver the government’s vision of transforming India into a superpower by empowering, connecting and binding Indian citizens, Dr Arvind Gupta - National Head - Information and Technology, Bharatiya Janata Party elaborated the need to focus on leveraging Information Technology to build Smarter Cities in India. Dr. Gupta emphasized his views during an address on Urban Matters at the SAP Forum for Public Services in New Delhi, August 13, 2014. 

 The recently concluded General Elections 2014 was a clear example of how India’s leading political party and the winner, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leveraged SAP Social Media Analytics to help uncover and extract emotions, behaviors and sentiments of Indian citizens to gain insights and engage with the citizens for their successful campaign.  

 “Today, citizens want effective delivery of services, improved governance and transparency in the functioning of big, complex and constantly changing cities,” said Dr Arvind Gupta - National Head - Information and Technology, Bharatiya Janata Party “To ensure better government-citizen connect and community collaboration BJP is working towards building a “Digital India” where innovation, research and technology will play a major role.”

BJP has started a social media campaign where volunteers and citizens can collaborate and contribute. This unique platform was also leveraged during the General Election 2014 for aggregating the top news and political content across the web every day. Dr. Gupta also believes that the power of real time analytics can bring the required transformation in handling a range of urban issues from Smart Utilities and Traffic Management. 

 “Challenged by rapid urbanization and rising population density, Indian cities need new models for sustainable growth, risk mitigation, resource management and financial restraint,” said Mathew Thomas, Vice President – Strategic Industries, SAP India. “Our government’s vision echoes SAP's interest in helping build a strong foundation for inclusive, effective and transparent government.” he added.    

Kotak Stock Trader Now On Windows For Mobile Phones

Kotak Securities announces the launch of its mobile stock trading application - Kotak Stock Trader (KST) on the Windows mobile platform. This is in an addition to the app already available on other operating systems like IOS, BB, Android and J2ME applications. KST enables Windows mobile phone users to place trades, check portfolio and account details, stream market updates on the go, amongst several other features. KST mobile app is free to download.

B Gopkumar, Executive Vice President & Head Broking, Kotak Securities said, “We are delighted to launch KST mobile trading app on the Windows platform. This is yet another endeavour to delight our customers with best in class products and services. KST for Windows is designed for a seamless anytime anywhere trading experience just as it is available on other mobile platforms.”

Non-customers too can get streaming data, access quotes, view charts and watchlists. Kotak Securities has over 1.5 lakh customers who use KST mobile trading app, of which 40% are guest users

Salient Features:

 * Only Kotak Securities offers a guest login for non-customers. Kotak App’s guest version allows non-Kotak Securities’ customers to register and use the app to gather real-time information on markets. However, to make a trade or place an order, one has to open an account with Kotak Securities

* The app provides real time Streaming Quotes.

* Trades placed through the Mobile App can be viewed, modified or cancelled through other trading platforms offered by Kotak Securities (KEATPro X, Website, Xtralite, Call-and-Trade) and vice-versa

* Double Security feature while executing transaction