Appterra is a SaaS global B2B solutions company. We focus on enabling inter-company transactions between commercial trading partners. Our solutions are cloud based and enable mission-critical multi-company business processes for enterprises in the global supply chain for the manufacturing, distribution and energy industries. As a managed service SaaS solution, uptime is critical for our customers. Simply put, if we are down, they are down and we are out of business.
Over the past several years we have seen substantial growth of our company’s user base within the Asian marketplace; specifically in China. Our global trading hub allows businesses to interconnect with one another and share documents such as purchase orders, shipping details and invoices.
We are committed to a 100% uptime standard as our customers rely on our systems to keep their factories and supply chains smoothly moving forward. With a few rare exceptions, we have achieved an average of more than 99.999% availability. We are also continually monitoring connectivity from locations all over the world including North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.
Earlier this month, we had a number of Chinese trading partners that were unable to access our system. At the time, we were 100% up and all data reflected that we had an excellent response time with connectivity in all locations throughout the world with the exception of some users in China and, specifically, on one particular telecom provider. What this meant was that these companies, because they had chosen an internet provider that was not reliable, ended up being unable to conduct business. They could not retrieve purchase orders, create invoices nor could they receive any other information that related to their services. This truly highlights the importance of not being reliant upon one telecom service provider for your business. All of those businesses had only one provider and when it went down, they were down. As a result, commerce with our primary customer, a global enterprise relying on the timely placement of these orders, suffered critical delays in their supply chain.
This is exactly why Appterra chose Internap for our IP services, with its Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology, because if one provider has a problem then we are able to seamlessly transition to another provider and our customers never experience an issue.
As we all become more dependent on reliable and 100% available Internet connectivity for our businesses, I recommend that anyone in business today demand a 100% uptime commitment from their Internet connections. Your customers won’t care if your internet provider was down, as far as they are concerned, you are down.
Because everything that Appterra does is mission-critical to their customers, Internap’s 100% uptime guarantee is a massive risk-reducer. This case study further illustrates the challenge and solution.
Guest blogger: Charlie Alsmiller, CEO of Summa Technology Group | Appterra
