FairCom RTG brings modern capabilities to InfoTrax legacy systems
- Modernization path from legacy system
- Comparable or increased performance from flat-file ISAM system
- Data stability
- Scale with growing clients
- Data reliability and integrity
- Single DBMS to work with legacy systems and new Java-based application
- Data replication
"When we started the RTG migration, our largest client did about $200M a year in business. Today, our largest client does about $1B in business. That simply would not have been possible under the old file system."
—Mark Rawlins, CEO of InfoTrax
Transcript:
Mark Rawlins, InfoTrax CEO:
I'm Mark Rawlins, CEO and Founder of InfoTrax. Our main product is a product called DataTrax, which provides e-commerce solutions, CRM solutions, commission solutions, and web tool solutions for multilevel marketing or direct-selling companies. All in all, we process about $2.5B worth of orders a year for our clients and pay out about $800M in commissions.
The biggest challenge we were trying to solve when we selected FairCom RTG as our database solution was the continued high performance we found in our flat-file solution but with the stability, scalability, and reliability of a database that had replication, SQL, and other tools that are more standard in databases in this day and age.
The real benefit of the FairCom RTG approach is they built it around the needs of the virtual machine that we're using, so our developers did not have to change their coding techniques
Jared Smith, InfoTrax VP of Research & Development:
Our application for many years was written in COBOL—so it was a legacy system—and we were looking for a modernization path forward. There are so many things that you have to think about when modernizing a legacy system; you don't want your database to be one of those. And if you tackle it all at once, you're going to fail.
So using very simple tools that allow that migration and allow you to take simple steps to bring your whole organization with you is very powerful. That then allows you to take it step-by-step, moving forward to something like Java or Mobile over time instead of one big bang.
Rawlins:
One of the really interesting aspects of implementing FairCom RTG is how simple it was.
Smith:
Right off the bat, we noticed that the performance capability was comparable to our ISAM file system. We also noticed the ability to replicate the data, which gave us a layer of security that we always knew our data was available in real-time and safeguarded.
Rawlins:
The major advantage that we noticed when we moved to FairCom RTG was the increase in performance we got in our very large environments. Some of our clients have in excess of one million independent distributors, plus all their customers.
We calculate how much they would earn every two hours, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 30 days a month. In one case, we write out 60 million records every two hours just to provide the audit detail needed.
The advantage of RTG is we can sell to people we could never sell to before. There were simply a lot of RFQs that came through that, if you couldn't mark some of these critical areas as "yes," they wouldn't even look at us. If you sit back and look back at the overall effects of RTG on our business—when we started the RTG migration, our largest client did about $200 million a year in business. Today, our largest client does about a billion dollars in business. That simply would not have been possible under the old file system.
