OpenCrowd Utilizes Amazon's EC2 to Scale March Madness Application

New York, NY (PRWEB) April 10, 2009

OpenCrowd , a services firm that specializes in creating rich internet, social and cloud apps, announced today the successful completion of College Fanz Perfect 10 bracket challenge which was developed using Amazon’s EC2 cloud technology.

College Fanz Perfect 10 is the biggest college basketball bracket event ever developed which offered fans a chance to win $ 25 million dollars. This contest allowed fans to play 10 brackets, one each for both men’s and women’s basketball in not only NCAA Divisions I, II and III, but also NAIA Divisions I and II.

‘This was a monster March Madness basketball bracket,’ said Bill Rasmussen, the founder of ESPN and founding partner of College Fanz Sports Network. ‘Never before have college fans had the opportunity to play 10 brackets in one place!’

In response to peak scaling and performance challenges associated with running a March Madness Bracket, OpenCrowd needed to develop a massively scalable solution which would accommodate the uncertainty and excitement associated with a $ 25million dollar contest.

The bracket technology was originally developed to run in an in-house environment. However, this deployment did not allow the application to quickly and cost effectively scale to meet the peak capacity demands and scaling requirements. The challenge was to find a way to deploy a new application that would dynamically scale to meet uncertain demand. Here is where OpenCrowd’s Cloud Services came into play.

OpenCrowd successfully developed and launched the contest using Amazon’s EC2 Cloud Infrastructure. Using a cloud deployment allowed College Fanz to properly align their business goals with their IT computing resources.

“OpenCrowd’s Cloud Services allow our clients to reduce their technology costs while increasing flexibility in their business,” said Sushil Prabhu, CEO of OpenCrowd.

According to College Fanz CEO, Bill Rasmussen, “OpenCrowd designed and developed the ultimate scalable solution for our Perfect10 Bracket Challenge. This solution not only allowed our application to scale effortlessly but significantly reduced our operational costs of running such a contest.”

For more information; please visit http://www.opencrowd.com.

OpenCrowd

41 E11th St 11th Floor, New York, NY 10003

Contact: Brad Buck

Phone: (212) 768-1730

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