In2M is a company who makes an online financial productivity and personal spending management system, including MVelopes Personal which won the prestigious 2006 PC World World Class award and was selected as one of the Top 100 Best Products of 2006.
In2M recently switched from an open source database (I'm not sure which) to Oracle Standard Edition. Oracle Standard is the lower tier database (i.e. cheaper) that does not offer additional features such as partitioning or OLAP processing. Notably though, Standard Edition comes with RAC as part of it's feature set and does not require additional licensing for it. You are limited in the number of nodes you can cluster though."The possibilities in Real Application Clusters were another big reason for us choosing Oracle," said Law. "Right now we're running a proof-of-concept, merging databases under Real Application Clusters, to check out the architecture before moving forward. We believe that Real Application Clusters makes Oracle Database Standard Edition powerful enough to support us for the next four years, even given our high growth rate, the critical need for high-availability and high performance for our customers."
What makes this announcement particularly significant is that the company heavily uses open source in it's offering.
"We use Linux and open source platforms because it's cost effective," said Jason Law, Vice President of IT and Systems R & D for In2M. "But we were not comfortable with an open source database product for delivering high-availability software as a service. Oracle Database Standard Edition gives us the reliability we need now, and will scale to meet our future needs for some time to come, even despite our aggressive growth plans. Our target is 99.99 percent availability, and Oracle has not failed us since we started using it."
The migrated application is currently online with 50,000 users and it is expected to grow another 100,000 in the next year. In2M found it quite straightforward to migrate the product's original open source databases to Oracle. And its next product, Mvelopes Business - currently in early testing and expected to be available later this year - will be rolled out from scratch on Oracle Database Standard Edition.
Also notable is that the user interface for the MVelopes Personal application is written in Open Source Adobe Flex. That makes the application completely browser based. The application offers security via SSL.
Features of the application include Transaction History, Online Bill Payment, Net Worth Tracking, and Mobile Access (cell phones).
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