SuccessFactors Case Study

SuccessFactors Scales For Successful Growth Using Azul

SuccessFactors provides state-of-the-art Performance & Talent Management solutions that help organizations of every size and category realize their potential through their talent. SuccessFactors serves 2,700+ customers with 4.7+ million users in 185 countries and 31 languages. Their application is critical to their customers' every day operations. Success Factors' scalable on-demand solutions are exactingly tailored for organizations to work together to realize maximum business results.

Software-as-a-Service application hitting scaling limits

SuccessFactors has the largest and most sophisticated software as a service (SaaS) platform in the world. Since 2001 the company has developed core expertise in building applications that are available to customers anytime, anywhere – the core of their business model.

The SaaS application is built on a hybrid, multi-tenant architecture and is data - and transaction – heavy. As their business grew, the application was demonstrating inconsistent response times that impacted the user experience. These inconsistent response times were the result of long garbage collection pauses that occur in current JVMs when heap size exceeds just a few GBs of memory per instance. In response, the company launched dozens of JVMs with limited memory, which caused the environment to become unstable and repeatedly crash due to out-of-memory errors. To minimize downtime, SuccessFactors overprovisioned the systems with memory, but this led to low utilization rates outside of peak periods.

Solution and Benefits

SuccessFactors chose the Azul JVM to offload Java execution from the existing platform and free processing from scalability limits. The result is 4x higher throughput with consistently fast response times for an outstanding customer experience. In addition, each virtual machine can now support 2.4x the number of users, allowing SuccessFactors to greatly reduce the complexity of their environment. This simplified infrastructure has improved reliability, manageability and TCO.

For SuccessFactors, the performance of their software-as-a-service application is critical to their success. By introducing the Azul JVM into their environment, they are able to provide consistently fast response times with room to support their continued rapid growth.

SuccessFactors is now implementing Azul's next generation technology, the Zing JVM.
 

INDUSTRY

Performance and talent management

CHALLENGE

Scaling the on-demand performance management suite to handle SuccessFactor's rapid growth

SOLUTION

Use the Azul JVM to offload Java Processing from the existing application platform

BUSINESS BENEFITS

increased throughput 4x

Increased user capacity/instance by 2.4x

Simplified the infrastructure 3x

Improved reliability