Digital River 2006 Annual Report Download - page 17

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conduct a variety of highly integrated marketing programs to achieve these objectives in an efficient and
effective manner. We currently market our products and services to clients and prospects via direct marketing,
print and electronic advertising, trade shows and events, public relations, media events and speaking
engagements.
Technology
We deliver our outsourced e-commerce solutions on several platforms, each of which has been architected
to solve our clients multi-faceted e-commerce needs. The following is a brief description of the technology
standards utilized by the family of Digital River commerce platforms:
Architecture. Our platforms are highly scalable and designed to handle tens of thousands of
individual e-commerce stores and millions of products available for sale within those stores. These
platforms consist of Digital River developed proprietary software applications running on multiple pods
of Sun Microsystems and Dell servers that serve dynamic web pages using Oracle, SQL server and
MySQL databases, and .net Microsoft IIS and Oracle 9iAS application servers. We use Akamai, Limelight
and Mirror Image’s worldwide caching technology to enable our platform engines to serve web pages
with consistent load times around the world. Our platforms are designed to support growth by adding
servers, CPUs, memory and bandwidth without substantial changes to the software applications. We
believe this level of scalability is a competitive advantage. The application software is written in modular
layers, enabling us to quickly respond to industry changes, payment processing changes, changes to
international requirements for taxes and export screening, banking procedures, encryption technologies,
and new and emerging web technologies, including AJAX, Web Services, DHTML, and web Caches.
The platforms include search capabilities that allow shoppers to search for items across millions of
products and thousands of categories based on specific product characteristics or specifications while
maintaining page response times acceptable to the user. We use sophisticated database indexing combined
with a dynamic cache system to provide flexibility and speed. The platforms have been designed to index,
retrieve and manipulate all transaction data that flows through the system, including detailed commerce
transactions and end-user interaction data. This enables us to create proprietary market profiles of each
shopper and groups of shoppers that can then be used to create merchandising campaigns that are better
targeted and more successful. We also use our platforms internally for fraud detection and prevention,
management of physical shipping, return authorizations, backorder processing, and transaction auditing
and reporting.
E-Commerce System Maintenance. Our platforms have a centralized maintenance management
system that we use to build and manage our clients’ e-commerce systems. Changes that affect all of our
clients’ e-commerce sites or groups of e-commerce sites can be made centrally, dramatically reducing
maintenance time and complexity. Most of our clients’ e-commerce sites include a central store and many
have additional web pages where highly targeted traffic is routed. Clients also may choose to link specific
locations on their e-commerce stores to detailed product or category information within their stores to
more effectively address a shopper’s specific areas of interest.
Security. We have security systems in place to control access to our internal systems and commerce
data. Log-ins and passwords are required for all systems with additional levels of log-in, password and IP
security in place to control access on an individual basis. Access only is granted to commerce areas for
which an individual is responsible. Multiple levels of firewalls prevent unauthorized access from the
outside or access to confidential data from the inside. Our security system does not allow direct access to
any client or customer data. We license certain encryption and authentication technology from third
parties to provide secure transmission of confidential information such as credit card data. The security
system is designed not to interfere with the end-user’s experience on our clients’ e-commerce sites.
Data Center Operations. Continuous data center operations are crucial to our success. We currently
maintain major data center operations in six facilities; in California and Minnesota, USA; and in Germany
and Ireland. All major data center locations are currently processing transactions and serving downloads.
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