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Over the last couple of years, specifically with the change in the global economy and rise of social media, businesses have been looking for more effective ways to reach out to the various audiences that they serve in order to tap into these resources. According to Mark Sylvester, CEO and Co-Founder of introNetworks, “Having a very efficient, very time compressed way to connect and communicate, in fact collaborate, becomes the new way to do business.”

There are literally thousands of Enterprises that have a particular challenge in trying to figure out how to harness the collective intelligence of untapped resources across the globe or throughout hundreds of chapters within an organization. At the very top of these Enterprises comes the challenge to educate decision-makers about the value of networks and how to facilitate the establishment and mining of these networks as a means to transform an organization into a more efficient and competitive enterprise.

The introNetworks platform offers an interactive Visual Matching Engine^TM that is used for rapidly sifting through vast amounts of information to arrive at qualified results, which can match people in just two clicks to products, ideas, groups of other people, resources and any information that can be represented by a tagged profile. 

In addition to providing accelerated matching, the introNetworks application enables knowledge workers to garner deep business intelligence, including real-time trend data, detailed reports and the ability to predict outcomes based on information collected in individual profiles.  This enables better decision-making and more effective communication and strategy formation.

introNetworks' original platform consisted of a three-tiered architecture that was built in Flash connecting to .NET middleware and an SQL database via XML.

In 2007, the introNetworks made the decision to do a total re-write of their application and move to an Adobe Flex remoting architecture with a vision for eventually removing XML completely.  The challenge then became how to integrate Flex with .NET without XML for better performance, which was what led the company to WebORB in 2008.

In addition to choosing WebORB, introNetworks agreed to become a beta customer for the Midnight Coders’ CloudPuncher.com service.  This service enabled introNetworks to effectively load test and monitor the performance of their application.

• Better Developer Communication/Workflow/Collaboration -  In using WebORB the communication between introNetworks’ Client App Developers and Server App Developers became much more fluent since the naming conventions on the client side were very similar to the server side. This made developing ideas and talking about these things much more intuitive.  This also made it easier to bring in new developers and integrate them into the project, because they didn’t have to dig into XML to figure out what was going on.
• Easier Debugging – WebORB also offered type checking at compile time and fewer lines of code to debug, which further reduced development time.
• Less Code to Develop and Maintain – introNetworks’ old architecture required a translation in both data in and data out for the client and the server. WebORB made that translation transparent and removed four steps in the translation process, which resulted in a lot less code to maintain and therefore lessened the chance for errors on both the client app and the server app. Additionally, not having to define XML structures freed up time on both client-side and server-side development.
• Better Performance -  A more streamlined path for communication between the client and server meant more data could be sent in less time making  real-time visualization of the information more responsive and interactive for introNetworks’ customers.  (See bottom half of diagram above.)
• Future-Proof – WebORB’s multi-functional feature-set means introNetworks can build in new functionality like chat messaging and better client synchronization of real-time data when they are ready to without having to pay anything extra for these features, because they are included in WebORB’s Enterprise Edition product.
• More Secure Environment for Networking- WebORB’s built-in security enables introNetworks and their customers to prevent unauthorized access to server-side code and data. 
• Better Data Management – introNetworks was able to persist data and handle conflicts across all clients using WebORB’s built-in client-synchronization and conflict resolution features. As an example, they could have many people working on the same list of projects and instantaneously see the changes each other made without having to poll the server.  
• Peace of Mind – Having commercial support was crucial for introNetworks, especially when deploying premise-based solutions for their customers.  Additionally, having the ability to load-test the introNetworks’ application using CloudPuncher.com gave them the information they needed to fine tune application performance and really know the limitations of what their application could support under any given load across multiple browsers and operating systems.

“Midnight Coders has been a great partner for us.  Their technology enables us to do things even quicker, both in development and in the application.  Their support – having the ability to talk to the right person at the right time gave us a lot of confidence in our ability to scale across the hundreds of countries we are in now.” – Mark Sylvester, CEO, Co-Founder

“It’s been an absolute pleasure working with Midnight Coders.  The whole group is really a class act.  The support response time has been fantastic and they really make us feel part of what is coming next from Midnight Coders, so this helps us stay on the cutting edge.”- Kymberlee Weil, President, Co-Founder

“It’s been a great experience working with Midnight Coders.  They worked closely with us in our evaluation of 3^rd party stress and performance testing solutions, including their own CloudPuncher service.  After using CloudPuncher, I’m very confident in what our application can support. I definitely recommend Midnight Coders products and services to others.“ – Anh Lam, Project Manager

“I would most definitely recommend Midnight Coders and WebORB to others. We’ve had nothing but a great experience with Midnight Coders.  The quality of their products and support is top notch!  If you go and look at other competing products you’ll find there is no match.  When it comes to price, performance, maturity and support, Midnight Coders and WebORB get an A+.” – Bill Devine, Developer

“We have been using WebORB for a couple of years and integrating the client code with the server code is way easier than it used to be. The client-side pieces are structured very similarly to the server-side pieces so a developer can go back and forth between the two very easily.  WebORB saved our development team quite a bit of time in that we didn’t have to define our XML structures for our APIs anymore.  I would recommend Midnight Coders to anyone." - James Wahlgren, Software Architect

• MS Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
• SQL Server 2008
• Dell PowerEdge 2950 II
• Dual Socket Intel 2.0 GHz, Dual Core
• 4GB Memory (fully buffered)