Software and services specialist Postcode Anywhere joins the Capgemini Immediate platform this month, delivering its address auto-fill services to Immediate's first client.
Postcode Anywhere specialises in geographic and address data services. Established in 2001, the company now serves over half of the addresses that are looked up and auto-completed online.
The Immediate platform, a "best of breed cloud computing solution," enables organisations to select and manage outsourced IT services from several suppliers, under a single contract with Capgemini.
Simon Macwhirter, Vice President, Capgemini said: "Immediate helps customers combine the benefits of web-based, or 'cloud' computing with the expertise of leading suppliers in the digital marketplace. The platform helps businesses avoid the commercial and logistical headache of contracting and managing multiple providers, the worry of delivery risk, and in particular, the complex issues arising from integrating web-based and legacy systems.
"By providing customers with rapid access to leading specialists who deliver solutions to unique customer challenges, Immediate is an ecosystem of the most up-to-date, market-leading digital services available. It's a best of breed cloud computing solution.
"Cloud computing technologies are increasingly used for managing information which is non-sensitive and changes rapidly, such as address and geographic data. Postcode Anywhere is a specialist with very technical expertise covering not only the PAF address dataset in particular, but the provision of rapid and reliable data services online. The business has proven itself to be exceptionally dependable, something which is reflected in its rapid growth and majority market share for online address auto-fill."
Postcode Anywhere's managing director Guy Mucklow said: "For us, powering the address look-up service for clients on the Immediate platform is the icing on the cake, after ten years of rapid growth in the address verification and geographic data sectors. We continue striving to use the latest proven technology to make life easier and more cost-effective for our customers."
Postcode Anywhere's co-founder and IT Director Jamie Turner oversees the team of developers responsible for maintaining the service. He added: "For the load testing of the service, we assumed a need for data speeds of up to 70 megabits per second, with potential traffic level peaks of up to 50 transactions per second.
"Although this is a lot of usage from one single source, traffic across our platform already routinely exceeds 100 transactions per second and can currently manage up to 500. This may sound like a lot, but it's all made possible by globally loaded-balanced servers, internal load balancing, and high-performance database servers with over a terabyte of RAM available. All storage is on solid-state drives. In fact, due to solid-state drives' lower access times and latency, there are no traditional hard disk drives in sight.
"For the last five years, the Postcode Anywhere service has provided 100% availability across its distributed web services-based platform, including planned maintenance. Vital issues such as reliability, scalability and security have been addressed to ensure our customers obtain the fastest response times of less than 20 milliseconds less time than it takes to blink."
Capgemini Immediate is made up of three main elements:
An operating model which helps organisations vet and select suppliers, and then manage and monitor their performance.
A Federated Business Platform that securely and seamlessly integrates these chosen suppliers with existing systems. The platform is fully flexible, so suppliers can be plugged in and out at will.
A commercial management model - Capgemini Immediate clients have only one contract, aligned to business outcomes or service delivery. Capgemini takes the commercial and delivery risk, and in turn contracts with several baseline suppliers.
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