Fundriver

Expedient Enables SaaS Compliance, Redundancy and Expandability to Support Product Development at Fundriver Inc.

Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, and founded in 2002, Fundriver, Inc. offers the only web-based endowment administration solution available. Called Fundriver Online, the software automates the administration and unitization of pooled investment funds for non-profit organizations. According to its website, the company got its start with an application developed for one university, which needed to track its endowment subaccounts and provide better, faster reporting. Following the success of that project, it soon became apparent that there was a market for the solution and Fundriver was born.

"From the beginning we found ourselves evolving, in part, because of customer demand. For this reason, scalability has always been a cornerstone in our planning both operationally and financially," explained Steven Kapor, President of Fundriver, Inc. "With that in mind, as we began to experience increases in demand for our product we wanted to be sure our technology and infrastructure could support our growth now and in the future."

Increased demand also fueled product development and as a result, a new product called Fundriver Online was released in March 2006. Fundriver Online PRO, a similar program with expanded capabilities, followed in January 2007.

To support these products, Fundriver needed to host a SaaS (ASP Model) solution in a SSAE-16 audited facility. Moreover, since the solution is web-based, uptime is a critical factor in its overall success so the facility needed to be fully redundant in every way.

They approached Expedient in the spring of 2007. "I was really impressed by their facility and resources," said Kapor. "They are able to provide the resources we need on-demand as well as maintain the uptime and redundancies we needed. The biggest draw was its SSAE-16 compliance, which was a must for us going forward."

Expedient worked with Fundriver to develop a solution that would allow for the redundancy, load balancing, auto-failover and expandability it needed to succeed. Together they decided upon a server virtualization environment.

Simply put, virtualization allows one computer do the job of multiple computers. Users are freed from physical and geographical limitations because virtual servers and desktops enable multiple operating systems and multiple applications to be run and accessed both locally and in remote locations by sharing the resources of a single computer across multiple environments. In addition to energy savings and lower capital expenses, virtualization also provides a higher availability of resources, better desktop management, increased security, and improved disaster recovery processes.

Dan Beal, Account Executive at Expedient says virtualization was the perfect match for Fundriver's situation because it would allow them to simplify their IT processes by leveraging existing storage, network and computing resources to control costs and become more responsive to the changes they are experiencing.

An early adopter of this solution Fundriver was one of a handful of server virtualization implementations Expedient completed in the summer of 2007. Almost immediately, Expedient gained a tremendous amount of traction with this product line, which has since proven to be an extremely stable and successful platform. This ability, coupled with its SSAE-16 audit, put Expedient in front of less established providers that are not equipped to offer value in these complex solutions.

Beal said, "Although it is becoming more mainstream, virtualization environments can be tricky if not supported properly - not just anyone can do it. Here at Expedient, we have fully redundant facilities, a proven platform and our virtualization solutions incorporate a failover mechanism for extra platform redundancy. Further, we provide onsite assistance and ongoing support. If those measures aren't in place, it greatly diminishes the likelihood of success."

"The solution went into effect last summer and so far, we are really pleased with the results. Over this past year, we have experienced at 130 percent increase in revenues due to increased demand as organizations see the positive effects of the software in other institutions. We have been able to support this growth because I am confident in our infrastructure. I feel that we no longer have any limitations with regard to volume, so I can repurpose our efforts into development and customer satisfaction rather than worry about outages or hardware failures."

About Fundriver, Inc.

Fundriver, Inc., based in Cincinnati, Ohio, provides endowment administration software to many of the leading not-for-profit organizations in the United States. The service helps clients achieve best practices in endowment unitization as recommended by The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and facilitates compliance with regulatory directives that address accountability to donor, preservation of historic value of donated assets (corpus), and equitable distribution of earnings.

About Expedient

Expedient is part of a network of nine nationwide data centers, and offers a wide range of managed services such as back-up, premium monitoring and management of firewalls, enterprises email servers and more. These proven managed services combined with reliable and redundant, SSAE-16 audited data centers enables Expedient to deliver premier colocation, network and managed services to high-end enterprise, commercial, education and government entities. Expedient is a proud member of the Continental Broadband family of commercial internet data providers wholly owned by Landmark Communications.

Privately owned Landmark Communications' companies are a diverse group of award-winning publications and media outlets, including newspapers, television broadcasting, cable TV programming (The Weather Channel), and electronic publishing. To learn more about Expedient please log on to http://www.expedient.com, or call 866-276-2973, toll-free.