News & Events

MyBuys Messenger - Summer 2009

Engineering an Easy-to-Use Service—Interview with Mark Weiler

One great thing about MyBuys is that it’s delivered as a service, so your company doesn’t have to do all the behind-the-scenes IT work to generate highly relevant recommendations. But somebody has to do that work and make sure it’s done right. At MyBuys, that’s the team led by Mark Weiler, vice president, Engineering.

Making It Fast, Reliable and Secure

Weiler manages all the technical groups at MyBuys—Engineering, Services, Operations and Support—which work together to build and implement the service, manage the data center, and support clients. “Clients rely on MyBuys to be a partner who can drive incremental revenue quickly, so we’re always looking for ways to simplify and accelerate implementation,” he says. After that, the focus shifts to ensuring the service is fast and highly reliable. “With the software-as-a-service [SaaS] model, unlike with an onsite implementation, we can continuously improve, test and tune our solution. My team does that constantly on behalf of clients, and they receive the benefits without having to do the research and development work.”

Because recommendations are an essential feature on client sites, MyBuys must ensure that its service is highly reliable. That’s why Weiler has set up the company’s solution as logical clusters of redundant servers, which makes the service highly reliable and scalable. This architecture seamlessly handles failover, so that if one node in a cluster fails, there’s no downtime for clients. It also allows MyBuys to easily add capacity as the client base grows so that all clients continue to receive speedy delivery of recommendations.

Coming from Microsoft, NorthStar Systems and Extricity/Peregrine, Mark has more than 18 years of directly applicable experience building highly reliable web applications, infrastructure solutions and systems software. An expert in building scalable software applications and integration software, Mark applies that know-how to ensuring the MyBuys’ service is reliable, highly scalable and easy to deploy.

To guarantee the security of client data, MyBuys has partnered with one of the premier managed hosting providers to run the MyBuys service in their data center, which is certified at the highest level of security and operational procedures. “There’s a trust in the partnership between MyBuys and clients,” says Weiler, “and we consider safeguarding their data as one of our key partner responsibilities.”

Getting the Electricity Without Running the Power Plant

The previous generation of personalization solutions, says Weiler, required onsite implementation and a professional services team to configure, tune and manage the system. It was a time-consuming, expensive model that, in the end, didn’t deliver the results clients wanted. He likens it to building and running a power plant for your business when all you really want is the electricity. “MyBuys’ SaaS model just delivers the electricity,” he says, “and we run the power plant. Not only that, but we run a more sophisticated plant than competitors.”

Weiler says that for essentially the same effort on the part of client companies, MyBuys delivers a more sophisticated end product than competitors: MyBuys offers more avenues for delivering recommendations (onsite recommendations, alerts, transactional emails), and a more refined and relevant set of recommendations. Why? “Because for every scenario, we use dozens of algorithms for each page interaction and optimize the results to present the best recommendations,” he says. “For every product detail page, there might be hundreds or thousands of candidate recommendations, but we find the three or four most compelling ones for each shopper and present those. Using the consumer’s profile to refine that optimization and selection process is something we do better than anyone. Ensuring we continue to have that edge is a fun and challenging problem I enjoy working on every day.”