richrelevance™, the leading provider of next-generation personalized product recommendations that enhance the shopping experience and drive sales, today announced that it is continuing to expand its software-as-a-service infrastructure to deliver the best performance, reliability and scalability for retailers this holiday season. The company added a fifth data center to its cloud computing network architecture to support increased holiday traffic for its rapidly-growing list of tier-one retail clients, which includes two of the top ten online retailers.

“I know first-hand from my time at Amazon.com that performance, reliability and scalability are the most important issues facing retailers during the holiday crunch,” said Darren Vengroff, Chief Scientist at richrelevance. “With 25 – 40% of their annual sales on the line, there is no way that online merchants can afford downtime or poor performance, especially in the current economic climate. We are excited to be the first vendor in our space to have not only one fully redundant data center — but five.”

Designed to deliver peace of mind to high-volume retailers, the richrelevance infrastructure was built by a team of experts, including renowned IT expert Elya Kurktchi, who architected the infrastructures of Akamai, Hotmail and Qualcomm.

richrelevance is the only recommendations provider to take a cloud computing approach, which is a proven model for delivering enterprise-grade performance, scalability and reliability. According to a March 2008 Forrester report, cloud computing has become “wildly popular” for the benefits it brings in deployment speed, increased reliability and reduced operating costs, and has been adopted by such technology giants as HP, IBM, Google and AT&T. In taking this approach, richrelevance protects its customers and their brands by preserving the user experience through traffic spikes or rushes.

The richrelevance data architecture features multiple, mirrored, redundant servers in distributed data centers in San Diego, California; Lansing, Michigan; Dallas, Texas; Houston, Texas; and now San Francisco, California.

About richrelevance

richrelevance is the market and technology leader in next-generation personalized recommendations for leading eCommerce sites. Founded by the former head of Amazon’s Personalization R&D team, the company's products increase sales by 10-30% by personalizing the shopping experience through targeted merchandising. The richrelevance recommendations platform outperforms popular collaborative filtering-based solutions through the use of more than 15 recommendation types, cross-placement optimization, and a closed-feedback loop. The SaaS-based offering is easily integrated, and empowers merchandisers through a robust, patent-pending suite of dashboard controls. The company is privately held and headquartered in San Francisco, California.

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