With In-Memory Technology, a New Breed ISV Supports 30,000 Daily Visitors at Retailer Gekas from a Single Server

For six years, Swedish ISV Heads AB has been running their in-memory retail software suite at Gekås, a €500,000,000 “superstore” with 30,000 peak daily customers. For reference, this is three times the size of Walmart’s largest superstore. With only one 4-core server, Gekås manages the entire point of sale, accounting, ERP, inventory, warehouse and supply chain functions in real time. Number crunching reports that previously required hours or days and multiple staff to finish are now completed in seconds, literally at the push of a button. 

To generate this level of performance, Heads uses the in-memory application platform (application server and database combined) from Starcounter AB in Stockholm-Sweden. Applications developed on this platform — using live data and running on a single multi-core server — perform OLAP/OLTP at the level of a data center. As a proof point, Heads has reduced Gekås’s IT infrastructure from over 100 servers to exactly one server, plus backups.

We will also examine Mopedo, a Martech ISV which enables advertisers to execute real-time programmatic buying transactions from behind their own firewalls. Previously, only external systems could be used for this purpose: a Demand Side Platform (DSP) was too costly to be run in-house. With Starcounter, advertisers can use proprietary data to run a secure DSP in-house and build true real-time processes for new sales, up-selling, loyalty programs and activation of lost customers.

In this talk you will learn how customers leverage the Starcounter platform to attack sources of latency by combining stack layers; and eliminating chatter, data motion and APIs, including APIs for microservices. You will see how an application can be located inside its database, so that coding is done directly on persistent business objects; and how, with smaller and vastly simpler code, programmer productivity skyrockets while data motion is avoided. 

You will find out how these and other innovations enable millions of fully ACID transactions per second on a single commodity server, avoiding the expense and complexity of scaling out across a cluster.

Starcounter: The next step in HTAP (Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing).