At Thunderhead, we like to say that our NOW platform was "engineered for the enterprise." What this means is that, unlike many traditional document generation solutions, the NOW platform was specifically architected to meet the needs of today's modern enterprise IT environments.
Open, Standards-Based Architecture
Thunderhead NOW is a native XML application developed entirely on open standards. Our XML architecture underpins every aspect of the NOW platform's design and production environments, with multi-channel composition and rendering enabled through NOWs native XSLT and XSL-FO core.
Our commitment to open standards means that Thunderhead NOW truly is a future-proof software solution. Thunderhead NOW is not based on proprietary technology and simply does not present the same risks of
obsolescence as other, non-standards-based systems.
Reducing Time-to-Value
At Thunderhead, we are very conscious of the implicit service costs that usually accompany software purchases. Unlike many other software solutions, we developed our solution to install easily, deploy rapidly, and deliver significant value "out-of-the-box."
Most Thunderhead customers find that they can install our software in a single morning. Most of our customers also find that they can deploy their first Thunderhead communications within weeks of their purchase. Further, our customers find that their business users can be trained and working with the software in just days.
Scalability and High Availability
Thunderhead NOW takes full advantage of its modern, Jave Enterprise Edition-based, n-tiered architecture to deliver the robust scalability and high availability that our customers demand from their full production solutions.
The NOW platform incorporates a Job Load Balancer (JLB) that allows it to distribute work and job processing across any number of servers in what is commonly referred to as a "server farm." Customers that find they need additional production performance can simply and inexpensively add additional production servers. Additionally, because job processes are distributed across multiple servers, NOW eliminates the single point of failure that plagues many traditional document generation solutions. If a server goes down, the job load can be dynamically reassigned and processing can continue without interruption.
Other Key Aspects of Our Enterprise Architecture
Please note that the following topics are covered in separate sections:
|