Website Performance Optimization, AllAdvantage.com The traffic growth forecast for AllAdvantage.com was far greater than their current level, so they needed to act quickly to be prepared for increased traffic. The AllAdvantage IT management called in the performance team from Rare & Dear who had previously helped on their database architecture. Rare & Dear assessed the current situation by analyzing system characteristics at the macro and micro level and identified the most severe system bottlenecks within three days. In the next two days, initial measures were implemented and tested by Rare & Dear who then provided recommendations for short- and long-term actions to allow AllAdvantage to quickly scale up their website capacity, with good performance. AllAdvantage recognized the need for outside intervention, and they cooperated with company-wide support to facilitate quick turnaround. Thus AllAdvantage management was able to achieve their goal of website performance optimization while continuing to focus on their core business processes. (For a description of our methodology, see Website Performance Optimization white paper.) "I want to personally thank you for your efforts over the past week on the Green project. You made a big contribution by improving the performance of our back-end infrastructure. We look forward to continued collaboration." Chad Balch, V.P. Product Development, AllAdvantage.com, Hayward, CA
	Application Development and DBA, Cheap Tickets, Inc. Cheap Tickets Inc. hired Rare & Dear as part of a multi-vendor team creating a pair of pilot applications to integrate travel industry data and display on agents' desktops. The initial source of data was the firm's rapidly growing web site. After this pilot, Rare & Dear designed and implemented a corporate Customer Database, fed by web site and internal accounting data. We developed SQL*Loader scripts and complex PL/SQL procedures and triggers including integration of a third party address cleansing subsystem for improved data matching. The Customer Database also provided data to the call routing and IVR systems, and express handling for preferred customers. When delivered, the system was tracking 3 million customers with 50,000-row daily load/update. For over a year, Rare & Dear provided all of Cheap Tickets' Oracle DBA services, until they hired their own DBA. During this period, data volume increased by a factor of ten. Response times on searches of 10 million records were held to a sub-second level even on a modest hardware platform. "Rare & Dear's team represents some of the best Oracle database people I've had the pleasure to work with. Their ability to target main issues and propose appropriate solutions has helped us grow a competitive website. With Rare & Dear's experience we've been able to scale easily and grow our site from 100,000 users to over 7,000,000 users. The customer database designed by Rare & Dear allows us to manage crucial customer data, effectively capture and mine site data, and handle customer care data with greater efficiency. Rare & Dear has shown a remarkable ability to understand our business needs and has responded with innovation and superb delivery." Ron McElfresh, Vice President, Product Management & Online Services, Cheap Tickets, Inc.
	Application Development, Nortel Networks Millennia Vision Corporation (MVC) designed and delivered a sales commission system for Bay Networks. The system included subsystems for flexible sales hierarchy and commission reassignment. To enhance their delivery bandwidth, MVC hired Rare & Dear to develop these two subsystems. Rare & Dear performed all development remotely from their offices on Kauai and delivered the system via ftp, e-mail and remote dial in. Subsequently, Rare & Dear again worked for MVC on a project to modify that same software into the mission-critical worldwide sales commission system for Nortel Networks, a global, Fortune 500 internetworking corporation. Rare & Dear provided the technical lead, analyst and assistant project manager. Their responsibilities included gathering business requirements, designing and implementing system modifications, and leading teams of developers to meet an extremely aggressive schedule. The system was implemented in Oracle Developer 5.0 and PL/SQL 2.1. "Rich was the boost that the team needed to succeed. He came in and was immediately productive in a very stressful situation. I counted on Rich to drive his areas of responsibility to completion allowing me to focus on the rest of the project. Rich was my trusted right hand man capable of running any part or the entire project in my absence." Ed Abel, Consulting Manager Millennia Vision Corporation (now called Quovera), Mountain View, CA
	Management Consulting, Cisco Systems Rare & Dear was hired by Millennia Vision Corporation (MVC) to help one of their clients, Cisco Systems, perform a Business Architecture review and make recommendations for data quality improvements on a 2 million site customer hierarchy database. The database provides centralized cross-reference between Cisco's mission critical transactional systems as well as enrichment data, such as company ownership, revenues and SIC codes. Rare & Dear worked with Dun & Bradstreet (who provides the hierarchy and enrichment data) to improve the quality and value of the data they provide to Cisco. Part of the project was to lead a team in evaluating various commercial data quality improvement tools and selecting the one best candidate to be used as Cisco's corporate data quality tool. The work was done partly on-site at Cisco's headquarters in San Jose and partly from our offices in Hawaii. "This telecommuting from Hawaii seems to be working wonderfully. I can't believe that you [Susan Stayton] are not "physically" in the meetings. You not only follow the conversation (including 'white board' scribblings), but you also tend to steer the discussion. Keep it up, you're doing great. (I will be glad to speak with prospects re: telecommuting.)" Don Martin, Marketing Programs Manager, Cisco Systems, San Jose, CA (MVC's client)
	Database Administration, University of Hawaii Foundation Rare & Dear installed and configured two Oracle Workgroup servers on Compaq Proliant (Windows NT) platforms for the non-profit fundraising arm of the University of Hawaii, UH Foundation (UHF). The Oracle database supports the software that is used by staff and volunteers to manage the entire non-profit fundraising operation. Our DBAs trained UHF staff personnel, created installation documentation, and solved a variety of system problems. Subsequently, UHF subscribed to Rare & Dear's Ohana-DBATM Services to receive onsite and remote dial-in Oracle database administration services. UHF outsources their entire Oracle DBA services to Rare & Dear. (For a complete description of Ohana D.B.A. Services, click here) "We are in the middle of a multiyear, multi-platform system replacement and one of the aspects of that installation is bringing up a database based on Oracle. We have, as part of our implementation, outsourced systems management and database administration work (to Rare & Dear). We are very happy to find we have some experts in Oracle here in Hawaii." Curtis Helsel, Director of Development Services University of Hawaii Foundation
	Data Warehousing, Bank of Hawaii Bank of Hawaii hired Rare & Dear to assist in building their Data Warehouse and designing scripts to load data from the legacy system sources. Rare & Dear also provided Oracle mentoring for their new DBA. After 1 month of running, the Warehouse was completely re-built according to Rare & Dear's improved design approach. A benchmark test indicated nearly a three-fold increase in response time and the system administrator was pleased with the maintainability of the new system. "We have used the services of Rare & Dear for database administration and data warehouse implementation since May 1997. We have found their consultants to be highly skilled and to possess a broad range of skills that complement those of our staff. I consider Rare & Dear a trusted technology business partner." Mary P. Carryer, Vice Chair Bank of Hawaii