News & Events

MyBuys Messenger - Summer 2008

Behind the Scenes with Chief Architect Rick Berman

Rick Berman

Even though Rick Berman, chief architect at MyBuys, is a technologist himself, he always emphasizes that MyBuys is a service company, not a technology company. “Our IT architecture exists solely to deliver the MyBuys service, which is a source of competitive advantage for our clients,” he says. “We’re not trying to innovate on the infrastructure; we’re innovating on what makes the service unique, such as constantly developing and evaluating algorithms to find the ones that deliver the best results.”

Handling Two Billion Hits a Day
As chief architect, Rick is responsible for making sure the MyBuys service grows gracefully as the company adds new functionality and scales to accommodate new clients. “We’re a shared service,” he says, “which means we need to be prepared to handle the volume from all our clients—and we are.”

Rick has nearly 30 years of experience making sure high-volume, high-available networks stay up and running. He was the director of technology for NBC’s website at the Sydney 2000 Olympics—a site that was designed to handle up to two billion hits a day. He also spent more than 10 years at Tandem Computers, who were leaders in providing high-availability, fault-tolerant computers for Wall Street and ATMs. Most recently, Rick was principal engineer at Epiphany, where he developed solutions for software that assists in marketing—very relevant experience to bring to MyBuys.

In explaining the MyBuys technology foundation, Rick says it’s a step beyond Software as a Service, an increasingly popular business model. “With MyBuys, you don’t even have to operate the application; we do that for you,” he says. “We deliver a complete web and email recommendation service. And that’s the purpose of our architecture: to keep things as simple as possible for our clients and to deliver a highly reliable, highly effective marketing service.”

Client Feedback Shapes MyBuys Service
For those curious about the MyBuys technology infrastructure, Rick says the company selects best-of-breed software, both open source and commercial. Java is the primary environment and the company uses Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to run its database. He says MyBuys will soon deploy a content delivery network (CDN) solution to further enhance the loading and serving of content—a change that will be completely transparent to MyBuys clients but that will make the service even better.

Rick highlights the role of client feedback in shaping the MyBuys service. “We listen to our clients and implement new ideas as fast as we can,” he says. “The architecture is set up to accommodate and exploit feedback. Many of our best ideas start with user feedback, challenging us to find ways to address client needs and enhance the service for everyone.”

Asked what he likes about his job, Rick says, “I love seeing software come together to solve a problem, and being chief architect gives me a front-row seat on that process. Our software development projects get put into production quickly and go to work on behalf of our clients. I like that immediate feedback loop, because if the change works, sales for our clients go up. And since we’re a pay-for-performance company, that’s the goal. When our clients succeed, we succeed.”