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This post was written by Marc Heurtaut, Chief Technical Officer and co-founder of Oxatis.
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If Oxatis were a car...
Warning: Any resemblance to a past or existing car, such as the Batmobile, for example, is entirely coincidental. I also want to add that this post has not been sponsored in anyway by BMW, Aston Martin, Renault, Mercedes, Peugeot, Jaguar, or Audi.
No motor vehicles have been harmed or mistreated for the drafting of this post. However, it's a good occasion to groove back to the Beatles. Off we go!
If Oxatis were a car, it would always be new, even though it's been on the road non-stop since July 2001. Maintenance on the Oxatis car would always be done with the engine running and it would never stop at the garage. At a cruising speed of 80 Km/h, the Oxatis car has already driven around the world about 148 times!
How many mechanics do you know that change the valves and transmission at full speed on the highway?
Well, that's what our technical team does every day!
Oxatis servers have been in production for more than 9 years. But unlike a car, Oxatis is not eligible for government scrapping incentives! However, our equipment has been replaced several times and our handling capacity has significantly evolved during this period.
In 9 years, we've never had to interrupt service for more than an hour, and only on a few very rare occasions that you can count on one hand. Oxatis fuel is the know-how developed in managing the architecture at the heart of our system. This expertise allows us to guarantee exceptional uptime, especially during sales and other high-volume periods with heavy loads.
In comparison, developing and improving a "platform" that doesn't have a lot of traffic or that only works on a single server is simple. Without many clients, a lot of other platforms aren't aware of the issues that Oxatis has to manage on a daily basis. There's no more improvising when you have several thousand clients, millions of pages generated every day, tens of millions of database requests and a constant server load! The Oxatis car is modular. It can accommodate a quasi-infinite number of passengers without ever slowing down or leaving them on the side of the road.
If Oxatis were a car, starting out in 2001 it would have been a small 2-wheel drive city car that over the years has become an all-wheel drive, four-door sedan with power steering, 7 airbags, multi-zone air-conditioning, ceramic ABS brakes, panoramic sunroof, amphibian with propellers, etc. that has been reconditioned nearly every kilometer of the way!
How many cars do you know that get better with age?
The technical team has developed and put over 300 major updates into production these last 9 years. Today, the system offers an exceptional, but often neglected, wealth of functionality that would be too much to sum up here. Just within price management, we handle multi-pricing, discount grids on amount or quantity for customers or items, we offer an extremely complete engine allowing e-merchants to define special offers on items, brands, categories or a combination of the 3, the possibility to set up flash sales, associate discount coupons to promos, create percentage off discounts or fixed discounts according to amounts in the shopping cart, etc.
The technical team works under constant pressure and the platform benefits from daily improvements. We have developed extremely controlled mechanisms (regression, back-up, etc.) and deployment strategies.
Ensuring forward compatibility (making sure all existing functionalities are compatible with the new ones) is also a top priority. At Oxatis, bugs are extremely rare - and I'm not the only one who'll tell you so. Our clients will tell you the same. Over the years, we've created and activated monitoring systems with real-time feedback. Any error found, whether it comes from the code or database environment, shows up in these tools that we analyze several times a day. This is also the case for the different software programs that interface with the Oxatis platform (over 30 different payment solutions, for example). In short, nothing is left to chance. For instance, when a payment interface is no longer responding, we've already contacted the technical department of the service provider to signal the problem before they were even aware of it!
If Oxatis were a car, its average fuel consumption would be less than it was in 2001 as well, even though its capacity has been multiplied by 20!
Even if we have more capacity today than 9 years ago, we have proportionally significantly reduced our ecological footprint by reducing the size of our equipment and our power consumption. Our new equipment is even "greener" because we understand that it's our future and our planet's future that's at stake.
If Oxatis were a car, it would also have a digital dashboard that adapts to each country!
Oxatis is available in 4 European countries. That means that all of the countries share the same code and the same database. In other words, we don't duplicate the platform for each country. That makes international development a permanent and exciting challenge! Managing translations and the development of new functionalities in a constantly changing environment requires close collaboration between the technical team and each country manager. Our engineers have to address all the functional and technical issues involved in international development (local laws and regulations, interfacing with local payment methods, user friendliness, etc.), which demands a lot of energy. This work requires flawless organization that, in the end, benefits all of our clients, no matter what country they're in!
2010 is full of technical challenges and I am completely confident that our team will be able to conquer them brilliantly and with a lot of imagination.
So, don't be shy...come and visit us! Your car keys are waiting for you on the Oxatis platform. You can count on us to teach you how to drive that car and to guide you through the maze of e-commerce. Start your journey today...filled with success and a promise of security. Baby, you can drive my car!
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