Thor Muller, CTO & Co-founder of Get Satisfaction

Thor Muller is CTO & co-founder of Get Satisfaction, a Web-based platform that powers over 35,000 customer communities. With its motto "Love Your Customers," Get Satisfaction is a leader in empowering organizations to support and engage their customers on the social Web. As a serial entrepreneur he is the co-founder of Rubyred Labs, a web development firm specializing in social networks, and Trapezo, a venture-backed startup that made Web software for syndicating content, acquired by Perfect Commerce in 2002. Previously, he founded a pioneering Web development boutique, Prophet Communications, later acquired by Frog Design where he served as VP Digital Media.

Presentation: "Get Satisfaction uses Ruby on Rails and cloud computing platform to achieve scalability and reliability"

Track: Real Life Cloud Architectures

Time: Friday 10:35 - 11:35

Location: Olympic Room

Abstract:

Get Satisfaction provides a customer community platform to help companies respond to customers’ questions, feedback, concerns, and praise – no matter where the conversation is taking place across the social web, including Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. With 5 million customers per month generating millions of monthly page views, scalability is a priority for Get Satisfaction. The company needed a cloud platform that would be able to keep up with its rapid growth rate, reduce the time and expense of infrastructure management, and improve upon slow deployment times that they had experienced with a dedicated infrastructure provider. Deploying the Get Satisfaction application to the cloud – not directly investing in hardware or heavy-duty architecture on the system side – allows the company to right-size its investment for growth.

Get Satisfaction chose to develop their applications with Ruby on Rails and has realized several benefits from using the fast-growing language and framework: agile methodology, test-driven, behavioral methodology, better code, reduced risk, and more performance visibility for the business. As a fast-growing start-up, Get Satisfaction wants a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider who would grow with them, while providing expert Rails advice. Get Satisfaction has been running on Engine Yard AppCloud since January 2010 – realizing the benefits of affordability, ease of deployment, higher performance and scalability, and 24/7 support.