YouSendIt business has thrived over the years from its inception in 2004 to date. YouSendIt’s basic product – ad hoc person to person large file transfer on the internet has enjoyed tremendous popularity and growth. The product provides real user value while reducing IT operational spends. The product has all the benefits of a SaaS solution:
- Business users can purchase and provision on the product on their own (single and team editions)
- Browser is all that users need to access functionality
- Desktop integrations make it still more easier and convenient for using the product
- There is an Enterprise version of the product with features of central management and SSO capabilities allowing seamless administration from corporate IT
Figure 1: YouSendIt’s initial LAMP based technology system
YouSendIt is a market leader in its segment and aspires to extend its product portfolio into adjacent areas of ad-hoc digital collaboration – like electronic signatures, document transformation, web preview capabilities, online real time collaboration etc. These new areas test YouSendIt’s technology platform capabilities of rapidly assimilating new technology and powering new products and applications, while maintaining existing scale of user growth.
YouSendIt’s initial and older LAMP technology platform implementation (pictured in Figure 1) was feeling all the pressures of a growing system not really designed for rapid growth and extensibility. The database and file servers were running hot, and development and operations engineers were constantly under the gun to continuously provide patches for maintaining system reliability and performance. Ultimately, this resulted in slowing down the pace of putting out new product features and YouSendIt’s position as a market leader was coming under risk.
There was a need to rethink the technology architecture and stack and tune it back to the vision. YouSendIt made a key strategic decision to invest in a technology Platform initiative. The main goals were to launch the company into the next stage of its growth – and increase velocity (increase number of features, decrease time taken) of new features to market.
Look out for more posts about the Design of the YouSendIt Platform!
Tags: LAMP technology, Large File, Market Leader, Platform, SaaS, SSO
