Landslide Technologies Delivers Leading-Edge SaaS with Red Hat and JBoss Solutions

Start-up shortens time-to-market, gains industry recognition Industry: Sales 2.0

Geography: Pittsburgh, PA

Opportunity: Build a high-availability Saas solution that could support product evolution, a growing subscriber base, and integration with multiple technologies

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, Oracle 10g RAC cluster solution

Applications: Landslide (a Sales Workstyle Management Solution)

Hardware: Dell, Cisco Gigabit switches, Cisco Gigabit firewalls

Benefits: Expedited time-to-market, optimized resources to improved product development, and delivered a highly secure, reliable solution that’s recognized by the industry

Download Case StudyBackground

Founded by seasoned sales veterans, Landslide Technologies Inc. is a pioneer in Sales Workstyle Management, offering the industry’s first solution designed to address the working needs of the individual salesperson. To support the habits of salespeople, the Landslide solution provides software as a service (SaaS) as well as a live administrative assistant—helping maximize sales time, drive action, and generate results. Gartner, Inc. has positioned Landslide in the Visionaries Quadrant of the Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation, 2007” for its high ratings in a number of areas, including the company’s completeness of vision, market understanding, and ability to demonstrate innovation in meeting customer needs. CRM Magazine also chose Landslide as the “One to Watch” in its Sales Force Automation category, which included companies such as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Sugar, and other leading vendors.

Opportunity

As an innovative start-up, Landslide Technologies needed the right solution to help the company speed time-to-market without requiring a large financial investment. Landslide decided that a SaaS delivery model would best meet its business objectives. “Providing a hosted service meant we needed a technology that would provide the highest availability and scalability— reliably supporting thousands of users as our business grew,” said Anupam Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Landslide Technologies. To meet customer needs fully, Landslide also required a flexible architecture that would enable the company to modify its product quickly as business needs changed. This flexibility would also allow easy integration with Landslide’s clients’ CRM and ERP systems. “We decided to use open source technologies, which would give us the most flexibility and interoperability to integrate with other solutions, including partner and supporting technologies we wanted to leverage. But we also needed top-notch support,” said Singh.

Solution

Once Landslide established the technological criteria it required to build a strong SaaS business model, choosing the solution was easy. “At Landslide, the decision to implement Red Hat and JBoss solutions was very close to unanimous because of the reliability and flexibility offered by Red Hat,” said Singh. “We chose Red Hat solutions for the rock-solid platform and excellent support offered and because JBoss solutions made dynamic development a reality for us.” The company leveraged its existing relationship with Dell to purchase its computing servers, as well as Red Hat and JBoss solutions. “Because Dell works so closely with Red Hat, buying the comprehensive solution through Dell was simple and cost-effective,” said Singh.

JBoss Application Server provides a clean separation between presentation, business logic, and database tiers, making it possible for Landslide to modify its product quickly and easily. “One of our product’s unique selling points is the rich, dynamic interface it offers. JBoss enables us to update the interface as often as needed to continue to enhance our user’s experience,” said Singh. Landslide also uses JBoss Hibernate to perform object/relational mapping. “With Hibernate, we’ve abstracted database specifics, eliminating common datapersistence programming tasks and significantly reducing development time,” said Singh.

Today, Dell servers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Application Server, and a Sun Java virtual machine. A load balancing front-end disperses customer access to the Dell servers. On the back-end, high-powered dual-core Dell servers run an Oracle 10g RAC cluster solution via Cisco Gigabit firewalls and switches for secure, reliable database connectivity. “We’ve created an infrastructure that optimizes performance and ensures the highest reliability. With their very high availability, Red Hat solutions provide the foundation. We know we can turn our system on and forget about it. And because it offers complete interoperability, our Red Hat-based system enables us to leverage all the best technologies and vendors—including disaster recovery and off-site backup solutions—to ensure our system works 24×7,” said Singh.

“Red Hat and JBoss played a crucial role in helping us develop an innovative, reliable product that is recognized by industry experts, analysts, and above all, our customers.” — Anupam Singh, co-founder and chief technology officer, Landslide technologies

Benefits

Using Red Hat and JBoss solutions, Landslide built the infrastructure required to deliver the first Sales Workstyle Management solution to the market. “This wasn’t just any project. The stakes were very high because without a successful product, the company would not exist. Red Hat and JBoss played a crucial role in helping us develop an innovative, reliable product that’s recognized by industry experts, analysts, and above all, our customers,” said Singh.

The Red Hat and JBoss solutions shortened Landslide’s time-to-market, enabling the company to apply its limited resources to create a better product and increase customer satisfaction. “When you are a startup, every minute and every dollar counts even more. With Red Hat and JBoss solutions, we were able to make our dollars go farther. The savings in administration and development time allowed us to focus on new features and functionality. All of this equates to more, happy customers,” said Singh.

Using mature, open source technologies facilitates the development, maintenance, and delivery of a highly secure Landslide product. “All of our hardware, as well as our database and application server technologies, are Red Hat certified. Interoperability makes our hosting and delivery much easier,” said Singh. Because the large open source community is constantly developing and debugging code, security risks within the Landslide product are minimized and quality and reliability are higher. “We were able to make a potential customer comfortable with the security of our solution by simply pointing to the internal algorithms within the JBoss/Red Hat code,” said Singh.

Leveraging one vendor for multiple key technologies and support enables Landslide to realize significant time and cost savings. “With Red Hat and JBoss solutions, you receive a wide array of complementary technologies supported by one vendor—giving you the advantages of a one-stop shop, without having to worry about vendor lock-in,” said Singh. “Knowing we have excellent support enables us to concentrate on designing and building a solution that exceeds our customer’s expectations. Red Hat and JBoss solutions have saved us an enormous amount of time and money. You can’t beat that.”