In2M Turns To Oracle Database Standard Edition For Reliability and Scalability

In2M Corporation is a small, fast-growing global business, delivering award-winning financial productivity applications to personal and business users in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. In2M is the developer of Mvelopes Personal, the world’s leading online spending management system, which was named one of “The 100 Best Products of 2006” by PC World and received the prestigious 2006 PC World World Class Award. Uniquely, In2M delivers its applications as a service over the Internet. Availability of the service around the clock is critical to its business success, and this need for high availability is one of the main reasons that In2M turned to Oracle Database Standard Edition as a key part of the infrastructure for its service.
In2M is a privately held corporation, headquartered in Draper, Utah. Over the last 12 months, In2M has enrolled over 50,000 users in Mvelopes Personal. To give some idea of the popularity of the service and the ambitions of the company, it anticipates adding an additional 100,000 subscribers in the next 12 months - a considerable growth rate. To support the size of the subscriber base and its expected high growth rate, In2M sees Oracle Database Standard Edition as the best product to use to underpin the service.

“We use Linux and open source platforms because it’s cost effective,” said Jason Law, Vice President of IT and Systems R & D for In2M. “But we were not comfortable with an open source database product for delivering high-availability software as a service. Oracle Database Standard Edition gives us the reliability we need now, and will scale to meet our future needs for some time to come, even despite our aggressive growth plans. Our target is 99.99 percent availability, and Oracle has not failed us since we started using it.”

Oracle’s support services are an important part of the total Oracle package for In2M. “We’re offering our product as an online service, and so its responsiveness is critically important to our customers,” continued Law. “For example, if our customers were to see reduced performance, it’s not sufficient for me to hop on open source forums to see if someone has a suggestion for a fix. I need to be able to raise a priority-one support incident and expect immediate assistance. With Oracle support, I get that.”

In2M found it quite straightforward to migrate the product’s original open source databases to Oracle. And its next product, Mvelopes Business - currently in early testing and expected to be available later this year - will be rolled out from scratch on Oracle Database Standard Edition. Looking even further into the future, In2M expects to benefit from another unique Oracle capability, Oracle Real Application Clusters, which it is currently evaluating.

“The possibilities in Real Application Clusters were another big reason for us choosing Oracle,” said Law. “Right now we’re running a proof-of-concept, merging databases under Real Application Clusters, to check out the architecture before moving forward. We believe that Real Application Clusters makes Oracle Database Standard Edition powerful enough to support us for the next four years, even given our high growth rate, the critical need for high-availability and high performance for our customers.”