What does the Chicago Park District, the Green Bay Packers, Portillo’s and the American Red Cross have in common?
If you guessed that their websites are all powered by
, you’re right.
Founded in 1995, the Des Plaines-based company builds and hosts websites for everything from small- and mid-sized business and organizations to Fortune 500 companies. By offering a one-stop shop for developing and hosting, the company’s engineers take a holistic approach to handling large influxes of traffic. We caught up with CTO Ryan McElrath to talk about the work his engineers do on a day-to-day basis.
What technologies power your business?
We are fortunate to have a large customer base that spreads across a diverse array of industries and across many markets. We're currently building customer websites on a growing number of platforms. This includes software running on Microsoft .NET/SQL Server (ROC Commerce, Sitecore, Sitefinity, Kentico and IDEV), open source technologies (Magento and WordPress), mobile (iOS and Android) and SaaS (Hawksearch, BigCommerce). These technologies are well-known and can power any type of business in need of a robust web presence.
Along with web development, we also manage the hosting and security of thousands of customer websites within our own data centers as well as other providers, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. Within our data centers, we use VMware to power our virtual cloud hosting environment and use networking devices from vendors such as Juniper, Cisco and A10. We also work with partners such as Akamai and Incapsula to implement content delivery network and security solutions for customers.
What are the most important tech developments you’re keeping an eye on this year?
In the last several years, we’ve started doing more to leverage our web development experience by offering high level digital strategy and consulting services to customers. A/B testing and data-driven decision making have been popular areas, and we expect it to grow tremendously this year. Getting the most out of the growing mobile user base will also be a major focal point for our customers this year.
In terms of hosting, we always pay a lot of attention to the area of cybersecurity and making sure that our customer sites are secure.
What are the biggest tech projects your team is working on this year?
Our focus has always been on our customers so we're constantly working to expand our capabilities in order to provide the highest level of service. We are fortunate to have the opportunity to work on a number of challenging projects for our large and diverse customer base. We leverage these opportunities to push the envelope in regard to the capabilities of the various e-commerce and CMS platforms that we implement and support. We expect this to be a big year for us across the board with all of those platforms, especially ROC Commerce.
What are the biggest technological hurdles your team has faced, and how did you overcome them?
Over the years, we've faced a number of situations where high-profile customer web sites needed to scale to handle heavy traffic spikes. This included NFL teams in the Super Bowl and e-commerce sites featured on popular shows such as Oprah Winfrey, NBC Today Show, and ABC's Good Morning America. More recently, we hosted WeatherTech.com's e-commerce site successfully through its third consecutive Super Bowl commercial as well as the Belmontstakes.com site last June when American Pharoah became the first Triple Crown winner in 37 years and the site immediately spiked to over 80,000 concurrent users.
Because of our expertise in both web development and hosting, we're uniquely positioned to help customers handle these types of high-traffic events. Many believe it's just a matter of having a lot of servers or capacity to handle these situations, but it usually comes down to the programming and database optimization and load-testing in the months and weeks prior to the event. Careful and diligent preparation is key.
Some of our first customers were in the college sports market, which then led to professional sports customers (NFL, NHL, NASCAR), so we were exposed to these situations very early on in our company’s existence. We've leveraged that experience well and continue to build on our expertise in that area today.
What are some lessons you've learned about working in Chicago that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
There are a number of great colleges and universities in the local Chicago area and the surrounding Midwest. As we were growing as a company, we made a big effort to reach out and build relationships with these schools and continue to do so today. We're biased of course, but we love the people of the Midwest and think that having Chicago as our base has been a definite strength for us over the years.
What do you look for when hiring engineers?
The number one thing we look for when hiring engineers is a distinct passion for computers, programming and working with technology. A good percentage of our most successful employees started working with computers when they were young and they still have that passion for technology today. These are people who are in the industry because they love it, not because it's a hot job market. We’re looking for intelligent people who get things done. It’s very important to find engineers with these qualities.
Image via Americaneagle.com.
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