Enterprise deployment: Email marketing application

dELiA*s trusts Pramati Server to reach out to customers

dELiA*s a premier New York based direct marketer, sells trendy clothing and accessories to girls and young women. The sales channels include over 60 stores in eastern and mid-west US, a catalog, and a website. The brisk pace of fashion business is compounded for dELiA*s as it focuses on teenage girls and young women, the most demanding sub-segment of this market. dELiA*s was acquired by Alloy Inc (Nasdaq: ALOY) in September 2003.

Challenge

The marketing staff at dELiA*s is constantly being challenged to create innovative campaigns that swiftly respond to changing trends and fads, and to influence what's in vogue. Nimble and targeted email marketing to over 1 million registered customers drives dELiA*s online and offline business. No off-the-shelf email-marketing product met dELiA*s needs and the company decided to build an in-house application based on J2EE for greater flexibility and easy manageability. The development team needed an application server platform that would allow them to deploy a reliable and high-performance system based on the advanced J2EE technologies. The platform also had to be affordable to meet the project budget.

Solution

In Pramati Server, dELiA*s found the ideal combination of a robust core engine, rich toolset, and moderate pricing. Pramati Server provided the reliable runtime essential for any system interfacing with customers and prospects. The rich set of tools for deployment and management shortened the learning curve as well as the development time. The platform was easy to develop on with its Deploy Tool for guided deployment, auto deployment descriptor XML generation, ANT handlers for deployment and administration, hot deployment, and archive validation. The exhaustive and intuitive management console provided a user-friendly interface for system administration. In comparing with open-source products, dELiA*s found Pramati Server much more reliable, more complete in functionality and richer in tools; hence ideal for deploying in production.

Benefits

Reliability. The email marketing application is running in a reliable run-time environment as a sophisticated web-based system based on an open and standard architecture.

Rapid development. The development team derived tremendous productivity gains from Pramati Server's high usability and the comprehensive toolset. The project was completed successfully on a tight schedule.

Easy management. The rich management console has made it easy for system administrators to manage and monitor the system without any third-part tools reducing the overhead costs associated with application server management.