E-Solutions Provider Frictionless Commerce Chooses Intel®-Based Servers For Search Services

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 21, 2000 - Frictionless Commerce, a leading provider of intelligent e-Commerce software, has chosen Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ processor-based servers to power its advanced, Web-based e-Commerce solutions.

Less than a year ago, Frictionless Commerce introduced its PurchaseSource* enterprise software, an integrated and open solution for automating search, selection and comparison - the most time-consuming elements of the purchasing process. PurchaseSource goes far beyond just finding the lowest price on a product. By pulling together other criteria that buyers need to make informed decisions, such as specific product features, merchant return policies, in-stock availability and more, the software helps buyers feel more confident in their buying decisions.

Since then, Frictionless Commerce has seen its customer base grow tenfold, as buyers recognize the software's ability to reduce search, selection and comparison costs quickly, thus reducing overall transaction costs. High-traffic sites, such as large enterprise purchasing organizations, mutual fund brokers and e-Commerce sites, use PurchaseSource to help users sift through more than three million products in more than 250 product categories from hundreds of on-line vendors.

"Service levels are critical to the success of our business," said Alexander F. Kleiner III, Frictionless Commerce president and founder. "We're in a business that has a very low tolerance for error. We run our spiders and data feeds on a continuous basis. Prices change, new products come out, and we've got to capture, aggregate and re-purpose that information dynamically and constantly."

Speed, Scalability, Reliability Drive Choice
The critical need for performance, scalability and reliability led Frictionless Commerce to choose Intel-based systems for its data center. "The price/performance of Intel-based machines coupled with Microsoft* Windows* NT made the decision a no-brainer," said Eric Spear, Frictionless Commerce customer relationship manager who helped build the data center. "We were pleasantly surprised with how much headroom we had and how we could optimize our own code to get top performance out of the boxes."

The center now contains 50 Intel-based servers, most of which contain Intel Pentium III Xeon processors, with full redundancy at every junction. Of these, several dual-processor Compaq* ProLiant* 6400R application servers make up the front end of the PurchaseSource solution, running the Frictionless* Intellidyn* decision support system and Windows NT Server software to allow users to prioritize product attributes. More ProLiant 6400R database servers tackle the enormous job of aggregating and normalizing product information from a wealth of different sources and data formats.

Spear calls the Intel-based systems "rock-solid" for reliability. "It's very rare that a box is down," he said.

For more information about how Frictionless Commerce and other companies are building their e-Business infrastructures on Intel solutions, please visit www.intel.com/eBusiness.

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