InfoSpace.com
InfoSpace provides infrastructure services such as e-commerce, content, message board, and other merchant and consumer services for more than 2,500 Web sites. Partner Web sites farm portions of their services to InfoSpace in an operation so seamless that users never acknowledge it. The company also provides Internet services for wireless devices such as cellular phones and pagers.
The InfoSpace platform must perform smoothly in this intensive, large Web-based business environment. The company is pleased with its choice of Windows 2000 Advanced Server, says Naveen Jain, chairman and CEO, and is migrating all 2,100 of its servers.
Server Scalability that Meets the Demands of the Internet
A primary reason InfoSpace turned to Windows 2000 Server is its scalability. "If you look at America Online, Netscape or MSNTM, they in fact all use InfoSpace services that run on Windows 2000-based servers today," says Jain. "That means 88 percent of all Internet users that go to our partners’ sites are counting on us to deliver services to them. That is the kind of scalability Windows 2000 Server gives us."
According to Jain, the distributed plug-and-play architecture and load balancing features of Windows 2000 Server allow InfoSpace to add machines as they add customers. “And we are able to put more load on each machine because the performance is better," Jain says.
Reliability and Performance in a Heavy-use E-commerce Environment
InfoSpace provides the e-commerce and merchant services infrastructure for the entire regional Bell operating companies across the country in addition to merchant banks and other local media networks that encompass millions of local merchants. "The fact is, all of these merchants rely on us, and we have to rely on the operating system to deliver the performance and reliability for those services," says Jain. "That's what we get with Windows 2000 Server."
Overall, InfoSpace is enthusiastic about the performance of Windows 2000, says Jain. "It’s easy to set up, manage, and monitor," he says. InfoSpace engineers report noticeable, substantial performance improvements of the company’s mission-critical applications. "Windows 2000 performs very well in a large database environment where we have a substantial amount of data and a very high number of queries per second," says Jain.
Reliability and Scalability for Wireless Data Communications
InfoSpace also provides the infrastructure for services and transactions over wireless data devices for many large carriers, including AT&T, Vodafone, Bell Atlantic, GTE, and Air Touch. These carriers expect the data services to be as reliable as a dial tone and available any time. "That means our services cannot ever be down," says Jain. "We count on Windows 2000 to provide the reliable solution our customers expect from us."
InfoSpace cites industry sources that project the cellular phone market to reach one billion users in the next three years. "To satisfy that kind of demand, you have to build a service on top of an operating system that you are able to scale," Jain says. "Windows 2000 gives us that environment."
For More Information
InfoSpace.com provides information and commerce infrastructure services for wireless devices, merchants, and Web sites. The company provides the information and commerce services for the leading global wireless carriers, regional Bell operating companies, merchant banks, and more than 2,500 Web sites. Founded in 1996 and based in Redmond, Washington, InfoSpace.com has 500 employees. The company has offices in the United Kingdom, Canada, and India.
The company is migrating approximately 2,100 servers to Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Advanced Server.
Learn more about InfoSpace.com at the InfoSpace.com Web site 
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Microsoft Software Used
Microsoft® Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition
Microsoft SQL ServerTM 7.0
Microsoft SQL Server 6.5
Microsoft Visual Studio® 6.0
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server Family
Internet Information Services 5.0
Microsoft Windows NT® 4.0
Internet Information Server 4.0
Microsoft Transaction Server 2.0
