Right from the start, NewsGator Founder and CTO Greg Reinacker believed in two things: that RSS had a real future, and that Microsoft Outlook would play a key role. He started his company around the idea that viewing RSS feeds through a folder in Outlook would be the most efficient way to consume information. By leveraging key Microsoft technologies early on, NewsGator created its robust RSS platform in less time—speeding time-to-market by nearly 35 percent. Today, the company offers a wide range of RSS aggregation products and social media tools—and has raised $18 million in venture funding to date.
Here is our conversation with Greg Reinacker, Founder and CTO of NewsGator
Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and When did you first choose the Microsoft Platform?
Greg Reinacker: Right from the beginning in 2003, and we also made conscious decisions along the way. On day one when you have two servers, it doesn’t matter because your costs are low. But if you scale, it can start to make a real difference—in terms of cost. Microsoft has been great to us, they helped us out with licensing, and we are also very confident about the business decisions we have made. When we compared SQL Server to other commercial databases like Oracle or DB2, we found it was pretty competitive. We think it has been a good solution for us.
MSUZ: What one MSFT technology is most critical to your business success, and why?
Reinacker: Hard to say any one, our entire system is built on Microsoft .NET—so that’s been a big win for us. We find the development is faster and cheaper with .NET. SQL Server for our online system is also a really core technology for us. We use 2005, and it is all on Windows Server 2003 [in our data center]—64-bit through and through. We also have applications on Window Mobile and on Blackberry.
MSUZ: Can you talk to us about the scalability and reliability benefits of using Microsoft technologies?
Reinacker: It has enabled us to scale and get to market far more quickly. In fact, we are very confident in the way we can scale using Windows Server and SQL Server. We have on the order of two million RSS feeds we pull in every hour or faster. We see roughly 7 million new articles a day, and at busy times we see 600 to 700 new articles a second. A lot of our online system is providing Web service APIs to either third-parities or to our own clients. For those, we handle between 15 to 20 million API calls a day and are peaking at about 700 calls per second. All of this speaks to the scalability and reliability of our system. Because most of the API calls are under service level agreements with customers, we have very specific levels of uptime we’re expected to make and we must have the infrastructure to make it happen. We have clustered and mirrored SQL Servers that make sure our uptime is where it should be.
MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support or integrate in the future, and why?
Reinacker: Everything we are looking at is under NDA, so I can’t talk about the really cool stuff. That is one of the great benefits of being a valued Microsoft partner…access to people making decisions about the future direction of the product roadmap. We are very interested in planned capabilities in future versions of Office and SharePoint. We are also interested to see what Microsoft does in cloud storage area—that would be something we’d be very interested in taking advantage of.
MSUZ: If you had to do it over again now, would you select Microsoft as the platform for your solution?
Reinacker: Yes, I would. Microsoft has been a good partner, and our relationship has matured over the years. We’ve made the right connections. There is nothing like getting in the room with the guys that designed the API for Exchange and being able to talk to them about what you are doing—it’s good for them because we help them understand how customers and partners use products, and it’s good for us because we get it right from the horse’s mouth. I think EBT has done a good job of helping us connect with people.
Greg Reinacker's Background
Reinacker is the Founder and CTO of NewsGator Technologies. Greg's background includes technical consulting work for companies such as Galileo International, as well as several commercial software ventures with companies such as McGraw-Hill. Greg is recognized as a thought leader in the weblog and RSS arenas, publicly speaks about RSS and is a vocal proponent of business uses of RSS and syndication technologies. Greg holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
For more information, read the success story: "NewsGator: First News Aggregator for Outlook Keeps Getting Better."
