- Achronos
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- Bungie.net Overlord
Tom Achronos
Bungie.net Overlord
twitter: http://twitter.com/Achronos
"I have no words that would do justice to the atrocities you commit to the English language, as well as your continued assaults on the concepts of basic literacy and logical reasoning."
Specifically, we are the largest installation of their software in existence. Hence, a case study saying "look how it supports them, so we can probably support you" is beneficial for them.
As for our business relationship, that started during the planning for the conversion from the old perl based bungie.net to one to support Halo 2. After a few experiments, I had decided that we should simply start over, and build on the much more robust .NET framework. Unfortunately, at the time, we only had one web dev (me), and there was simply no way we could finish everything in time. You may remember that we actually didn't port the groups over until a few months after the rest of the site became part of the new hotness. Anyway, we decided that high-capacity forum software is a solved problem that other companies are very good at, so we started soliciting quotes from various companies (Ideal Science included) for software that would meet our needs. In our case, those needs were full source code, many multiple forums, highly scalable, high performance, and use SQL Server and ASP.NET as its core technology.
As we evaluated products, we found that not many met this standard. ASP.NET being required meant we couldn't use many of the existing packages, which is why Ideal Science's quote was interesting. Their ASP board was great, but unusable by us. However, the offered very attractive terms and a seat at the development and design table for their new ASP.NET software. That pretty much beat out everyone else, because we could direct the development to making the best forum for our needs without having to fit our needs into someone else's design. It also helped that they were very professional and the relationship worked really well.
The result was this forum software, which I have subsequently heavily modified for various reasons. They then took the code and built out their stand alone forum product and sell it. The resulting software is not for the faint at heart - it is designed to be really powerful and is not for people who aren't software engineers. But if you are, you'll really like how you can pretty much change everything about it if you need to (that was the point).
Posted by: Recon Number 54
If you don't mind, allow me to spin your observation.
They are following the growth and experiences of this site in order to document how their product performs in a real-world environment. We're an excellent subject for a case study due to the fact that this site's traffic and growth are significant, well documented, and since Bungie is a Microsoft subsidiary, infrastructure can be scaled to meet that growth with very little lag between "growth in traffic" and "infrastructure expands to respond".
This hardware and network flexibility will allow the ongoing data collection to show how the software performs with very little skewing due to other considerations or factors.
You're not being used, you are part of the future!