Lead Analytics Case Study

Industry Challenge

Facebook is great but isn’t the right answer for all user communities as evidenced by LinkedIn and other specialized communities. Lead Analytics brought a challenge to EC Wise to develop a social network platform that incorporated all of the existing features of the existing social networks and include new innovative features specific to markets they had identified. While many social networking platforms existed, few could be extended to provide the features required and none of them could be scaled to handle an estimated 20 million monthly active users. Another critical requirement of the solution was the need to perform advanced analytics on the social graph, navigation paths, textual content, ratings, rankings and links within the network. These analytics are used to drive highly targeted content, offers and suggestions to the network users.

Solution

EC Wise architected a multi-tier cloud based social networking solution using the latest technologies and partnered with leading cloud service and software vendors to ensure that Lead Analytics can launch into their vertical market with confidence in the feature set and scalability of their social network. Where possible, the open source LAMP stack was used to reduce provisioning costs and commercial technologies were used as necessary to achieve security, scalability or performance goals. A variety of cloud providers were research and two final candidates selected and bake-off load testing on each is being performed.

For application development, the Php Zend Framework was selected for its stability and flexibility. The commercial Zend Php Server software was selected to provide control and management of the large number of web servers required. RightScale was selected to provide cloud scalability, monitoring and reliability for the entire multi-tier solution. MySQL clusters provide the relational back end for the network and additional NoSQL and caching solutions are used to build-in the performance required for social networking workloads. In addition to the cloud components of the social network EC Wise developed a highly secure identity server using a four tier Microsoft solution with servers in SAS 70 secure hosted facilities to store personal information collected in the network.