Accarda AG Increases Customer Acquisition Rate and Enhances Customer Service with Red Hat

Accarda AG is an established supplier of integrated customer relationship management. The company was founded in 1970 under the name NCR Data Center and has been growing steadily ever since. It has been operating under the name Accarda AG since 2005. In 2007, Accarda was taken over by the Maus Frères Group (70 percent) and the Aduno Group (30 percent). This joint venture significantly increased both Accarda’s range of services and plans for future growth. Today, Accarda AG has more than 200 employees and its loyalty cards are used by the majority of Swiss households.

Attracting customers and developing customer loyalty are Accarda’s core competencies, combined with a dedication to provide transparency to its customers’ needs. A wide range of information is required to develop innovative solutions and strategies in customer relationship management, and Accarda has this information at its disposal.

A powerful IT infrastructure is key to successful implementation and support of sustainable customer loyalty programs. “It plays a central role in the implementation of sophisticated customer retention programs, customer interaction processes, and payment and financing solutions,” explained Philippe Pulsfort, head of IT Operations at Accarda AG. “Our solutions incorporate innovative ideas, concepts, and strategies to efficiently solve the challenges of new customer acquisition, customer development, and retention.”

As demands from its clients significantly increased, Accarda looked to provide its data warehouses and data marts with the ability to analyze data more accurately and to arrange more targeted marketing campaigns. The objective was to enable clients to access data via secure web interfaces, critical for market segmentation and determining product trends. Due to these web interfaces, Accarda’s customers are now able to prepare their data with the help of extensive business intelligence functions and can analyze, for example, the effectiveness of specific activities such as campaigns and promotions.

To support its web interfaces, Accarda selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform from Red Hat on the basis of the company’s wide-ranging Java expertise. The platform includes extensive open source technologies for creating, supplying, and operating Java-based applications and services. Furthermore, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform supports a wide range of standards for Java EE and web services.

The initial manageable solution was just a few servers running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and was scaled rapidly into an extensive IT infrastructure for web interfaces and web applications. Almost all new applications run on an open source stack. The infrastructure consists of two HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosures, each with six HP ProLiant BL465c G7 boards (AMD Opteron 6136, two sockets, each with eight cores and 128 GB RAM).

For the management and monitoring of the JBoss Application Server, Accarda uses JBoss Operations Network. Several resources can be managed simultaneously by creating groups in JBoss Operations Network. By using the command-line interface, an experienced administrator can create scripts for frequently recurring tasks, which makes day-to-day work much easier. In addition, JBoss Operations Network can be used as an ‘early warning system’ for live systems by means of definable alerts. Possible abnormalities, like the actual availability of JBoss and the number of messages in the JMS queues, can be detected and corrected effectively. As a result, Accarda has seen enhanced reliability and availability across the Java infrastructure.

While the platform was only used for selected projects at the beginning, the advantages of standardization on an open source platform quickly became clear. “JBoss Enterprise Application Platform allows us to combine stability, reliability, certified environments, and professional support with the advantages of rapid innovation and the vibrancy of the open source community,” said Pulsfort.

Accarda used the services of Red Hat Consulting primarily for the configuration and deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. “Red Hat Consulting services fully met our specific requirements and have been crucial in ensuring that we achieve maximum safety and efficiency,” said Pulsfort. “At the same time, we have benefited from a knowledge transfer which has shortened the learning curve and has helped maintain and, in many cases, increase our high performance levels.”

The administration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers is carried out with Red Hat Network Satellite system management solution. Accarda is now in a position to maintain its Linux landscape at every stage, from installation to configuration right through to patch and security management as well as comprehensive monitoring capabilities. At Accarda, one administrator is sufficient to manage approximately 100 Linux servers.

“We have been working with Red Hat for several years now and we plan to grow our open source-based infrastructure with Red Hat in the future. For us, adopting open source solutions is part of the overall strategy to keep abreast of technological progress. Our experience with Red Hat solutions has been extremely positive. Red Hat provides us with everything we need, including first-class support,” concluded Pulsfort. “The open source stack based on Red Hat solutions and JBoss Enterprise Middleware has proven to be extremely flexible and highly productive, and we are now considering running other components of our mission-critical infrastructure on our open source stack.”