Netli Netli is the fastest growing global service provider for accelerating applications and content over the Internet

Netli provides network infrastructure on demand, optimizing application and content delivery while shifting bandwidth, computing, and storage requirements to Netli’s infrastructure. Large multinational corporations such as Verizon Business and Hewlett Packard use Netli to ensure that their customers receive LAN-like response times when accessing their web application from anywhere in the world.

Company: Netli, Inc.

Offering: Global business services for accelerating applications and content over the Internet

Objective: A reporting and analytics solution to provide timely visibility into very large volumes of data.

Challenges:1) Data collected is semi-

structured and complex2) Customers demand near

real-time analysis and reporting

Solution: Skytide Analytical Platform

Results:1) A rapidly-deployed,

easy-to-use reporting and analytics solution

2) Built to handle huge volumes of complex semi- structured data

3) A complete set of BI features and functionality at a fraction of the cost and time

C A S E S T U D Y

Business ChallengeAs part of its core solution offering, Netli collects large quantities of data, including website response times, throughput, and other pieces of information related to overall application performance and availability. Netli’s customers were increasingly asking for a reporting and analytics solution integrated directly into Netli’s global overlay network that could be used to sift through, analyze, and provide visibility into overall application performance. Over time, as Netli continued to broaden its reach into larger accounts, providing this capability had become absolutely essential. Netli’s operations team was also looking for tools that would increase their ability to measure the operational efficiency of the network, manage SLAs, and provide “low latency” technical support by being able to pinpoint issues through the use of advanced analytics.

These requirements posed a significant data analysis challenge for the Netli product management team. The data that Netli collects for its customers is semi-structured and quite complex,

and data volumes are massive. Netli’s network manages hundreds of millions of transactions daily, and this number will be in the billions in less than a year. This level of activity generates 500 gigabytes of log files daily, with this number expected to quadruple in a year, eventually reaching two terabytes per day, or nearly one petabyte of data annually. At the same

time, Netli needed to be able to provide near real-time analysis and reporting to meet customer and internal demands and differentiate itself from its competitors.

Netli knew that processing such large volumes of non-tabular data using traditional business intelligence (BI) would be prohibitively expensive and slow. Netli needed an

entirely different approach to BI in order to achieve its goal of providing comprehensive, fast reporting and analytics to its customer base and internal operations.

The SolutionNetli implemented the Skytide Analytical Platform to provide its customers with immediate visibility into the performance of the managed web infrastructure, while giving its internal operations team fast

“Netli has selected Skytide because it provides the unique ability to rapidly process large volumes of data and enables compelling visibility through advanced analytics at a significantly lower TCO as compared to alternative and traditional analytical solutions,”

Tim Knudsen Netli Sr. Director of

Product Management

insight into network performance and the ability to perform customer value analysis and pinpoint problems quickly. Skytide’s breakthrough technology was designed from the ground up to concurrently address large volumes of traditional and non-traditional data sources, such as the activity log files collected in the Netli system.

Skytide Analytical Platform uses XML as a common layer to significantly reduce system complexity while offering advanced functionality that cannot be achieved by traditional BI technology. By using XML to tie together different pieces of the BI stack into an integrated, “virtual” technology stack, Skytide is able to operate on data where it resides, with no movement or restructuring of data required. With Skytide, Netli is able to analyze large amounts of data coming directly out of activity log files

and various network applications without the need to transform and store this data in a data warehouse. This results in extremely high data throughput and near real-time analysis and reporting.

The ResultsUsing Skytide, Netli can now offer its customer base rapidly deployed reporting and analytics services that are easy to use and built to handle the complexity of the data volumes and structures that are typical in today’s highly interactive web environment. At the same time, Netli can now also provide its internal users with immediate insight into network performance while enabling fast customer value analysis and the ability to quickly identify and handle problems as they arise. This complete set of BI features and functionality comes without the inherent latency and complexity of traditional BI technology—all at a fraction of the cost and time. Skytide is built to scale as Netli’s business grows, both with new customers and volumes of data. Scalability is increasingly valuable to Netli as the company pursues larger customers who use analytics as a baseline for making technology investment decisions.

“Netli has selected Skytide because it provides the unique ability to rapidly process large volumes of data and enables compelling visibility through advanced analytics at a significantly lower TCO as compared to alternative and traditional analytical solutions,” said Tim Knudsen, Netli’s Sr. Director of Product Management.

About SkytideSkytide delivers business analytics solutions that provide timely and unprecedented insight into the constantly changing environment in which today’s businesses operate. The XML-based Skytide Analytical Platform is the first and only solution available today that can understand complex data from virtually any source, including unstructured data such as XML and HTML, delivering the visibility necessary to make critical business decisions. Skytide customers include Fortune 1000 companies across a wide range of market segments, including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, utilities, and retail. Founded in 2003, Skytide is a privately held, venture-backed company headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley.

Skytide-based infrastructure was deployed as a two-tier system to process terabytes of network access log files, collected daily from over 20 virtual data centers (VDC), into network access, network performance and customer value reports, and billing data

© 2006 Skytide, Inc. All rights reserved. Skytide and the Skytide logo are registered trademarks of Skytide, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Skytide, Inc.

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Phone: 1.650.292.1900

Fax: 1.650.312.1400

E-mail: info@skytide.com

Internet: www.skytide.com