How Quick Win Software Can Reap Huge Rewards
PayPal, which has 17 million customers and sends out millions of e-mails every week, was using a big collection of its own machines?running an open-source mailer program?to deliver all the messages. "If the [mail] engine broke, you’d have half a dozen guys working on it," recalls Levchin, who remembered two or three blowouts that resulted in both a loss of business and customer goodwill.
Since the company installed the IronPort mail appliance, which is optimized to assemble and send half a million messages an hour, as well as handling bounce-backs and related issues, PayPal’s maintenance costs have dropped by 50 percent while stability greatly increased. "It’s a cheap packaged solution that takes away the complexity?definitely a great deal," says Levchin. One deal among many?apparently?for CIOs who are willing to look.
