Entegral launches ground breaking new Cloud Infrastructure

image We are proud to announce that we have moved all real estate products and websites (including the OMS) to our new Cloud Hosting infrastructure at Amazon AWS. 
Entegral takes the lead by being the first real estate service provider in Southern Africa to make this bold move. Our new cloud infrastructure will allow us to scale our products and services to new levels and provide an unparalleled service uptime. Although we have an excellent track record with service uptime, the outages caused by last week’s hardware failures on our dedicated servers, prompted us to make the move earlier than the planned switchover in June.  With over 100 new SEO profile websites launched in November 2010 we were also quickly outgrowing our dedicated server environment.
What is ‘the cloud’?
Cloud computing provides Entegral with the power of a shared pool of configurable computing resources (i.e. servers, networks, storage, etc) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort. It provides a level of flexibility & uptime in our hosting environment not possible with traditional ‘dedicated’ servers we were running on until now. In short, more computing power when we need it, more storage for photos, files etc, and definitely more control.
image Cloud computing is all the hype right now in the IT world. Large companies like Google and Facebook rely on cloud computing to serve millions of users simultaneously and provide tons of reliable storage.
One of the other big advantages is how environmental friendly it is, with up to 90% less electricity consumption when compared to traditional servers.  Our new hosting infrastructure is cutting edge to say the least, and a long term solution that can scale with your and our business.
How was the move to the cloud done?
We started researching  & testing local and international cloud hosting infrastructure solutions more than a year ago.  We also investigated ‘virtual servers’ which provides better uptime than dedicated servers, but have other drawbacks and less functionality when compared with a fully fledged cloud solution.
image Towards the end of 2010 we converted and tested our key products on the industry leading, Amazon AWS Cloud solution. After lots of tweaking and finding the right combination of services to use, we launched www.MyProperty.co.za on the Amazon Cloud at the end of January 2011. Confident of our new solution we launched our key national clients on the cloud, while still keeping backup sites on our dedicated servers in case something went wrong.
3 Months on we were satisfied with the overall results and planned for the switchover of our websites and the OMS to the cloud early in June.  On Friday 20 May we unfortunately experienced an outage on our dedicated servers which prompted the move earlier than expected.  This event just confirmed that we have made the right decision. Working 20 hours/day over the last week to get everything in place was a wonderful commitment from the Entegral team. The move also involved moving over 10,000,000 property photos over to our new servers!
Building for the future
Back in 2005 we launched Southern Africa’s first online real estate management system (OMS) in South Africa and Namibia. Our competitors downplayed the technology as being expensive ,“you have to be on the internet all the time!”,  but today, ironically, most are following in our footsteps to port their systems to online.  We are now again at a technology cross road with the early adoption of cloud computing technology.

If you have any questions, post a comment here, on our Facebook page, Twitter or email.
Lastly, in case you wonder who Amazon is, here is a slideshow giving some insight.
Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire

Popular posts from this blog

Easily link Base with external CRM systems

Image
What is the Base Zapier integration? The Entegral Base system was recently improved with a native Zapier app integration . This allows estate agents to exchange data and create automated workflows with over 2000+ popular apps, including all the leading CRM specific apps.  Why even link a CRM system? Although Base has contact management, contact categories, automatic lead import, and other great CRM features , users sometimes require very specific CRM functions that we don't (yet) cater to. With our Zapier integration , we allow agents to link any popular app with Base. Once linked with your app, you can for instance automatically synchronise your contacts from Base to the external app or vice versa.  The added benefit is that you can create automated workflows and link more apps (e.g. insert contact details into a Mailchimp drip email campaign  and ZOHO CRM at the same time). This makes the Zapier fee irreverent compared to the derived benefits.  Automated portal l...
Read more

Property24 acquires Private Property, what do estate agents think?

Image
Property24.com, South Africa’s largest property portal owned by Naspers, has bought rival Private Property . The deal is likely to come under the close scrutiny of competition authorities as it involves the two biggest property portals in the country. Due to the impact of such an acquisition on the industry, Entegral was interested to find out what the perceived advantages and disadvantages of such a deal would be, both through the eyes of the consumer and the estate agent.   Here are the results from around 250 responses received on a survey done over a 2 day period , mostly from agents and agency owners. While the survey presents a small portion of the market (a ccording to the EAAB's latest annual report there are 19,424 registered agents and agency owners, excluding intern estate agents, in South Africa) , f eedback has been received from well-respected agency owners and agents, and we believe this gives a good indication of the current view of agents. The fear from estate ...
Read more

New Flex integrated tenant application module launched

Image
Tenant applications can take up a considerable amount of admin time. This includes getting the application, managing it somewhere centrally, and keeping it safe for further access. We had a look at how we could not only streamline and optimise this process but also develop an integrated tenant application module. The result of this is our newly launched optional tenant application for your Flex website (available in standard and premium packages). Integrated  Tenant Application wizard for Flex Once enabled, an integrated tenant application link will show on all your rental listings like this: You can see it in action on this sample rental property on our Flex Bold demo site. It takes you through a wizard where all application details including personal contact, bank, and supporting documents are captured. Since Flex is responsive, the application is seamlessly integrated and will work on any device. With 100% uptime and SSL security as standard, tenants can capture in confidence....
Read more