DJHill & Associates

client and needs
(2000) SkyMall.com is a top 100 online retailer, internationally recognized by their in-flight retail catalogs, found on 95% of domestic flights, and many international carriers.

SkyMall had, like many retailers at the time, just discovered that a strong online presence in combination with thier traditional channels could drastically boost revenue. A local firm had been chartered to build SkyMall.com, and (for a very handsome fee) had delivered a shaky e-commerce site that worked just well enough to prove to SkyMall strategists that e-tail could be a very profitable endeavor for the retailer.

But, like most new e-tail firms, their existing infrastructure left serious holes in customer service applications, fulfillment and inventory management--and just plain "up-time". After an embarrassing 1998 online holiday season, SkyMall decided to invest appropriately and do it right.

our contract
djhill founder, Daniel Hill, and most of our core team were contracted to:

	Fix immediate issues with existing infrastructure to make it function properly.
	Fix production architecture and application issues to increase uptime and handle drastically increasing traffic.
	Rebuild SkyMall.com's entire application infrastructure properly to handle increased traffic and be more user friendly/graphically appealing. (versions 2.0, 2.1, Feb-Oct 1999)

important note
djhill core team members were individually contracted to work on the SkyMall rebuild, djhill as an entity did not exist at that time. The SkyMall.com project brought the core team of djhill together, with Daniel Hill going on to found the corporation after the close of his SkyMall contract, and the core team members joining djhill after their contracts with SkyMall closed.

Results...

	Site performance was increased by more than 3000 simultaneous user sessions per server.

	Site application downtime decreased dramatically (to within acceptable industry standard metrics) after the version 2.1 release.

	SkyMall's call centers were able to work with on-line and off-line orders without switching customer service/order tracking applications.

	Quality of fulfillment increased dramatically, along with product delivery times--customer service now had the ability to accurately track an order through the fulfillment process.

	During our tenure at SkyMall.com, online business grew from only 2% of corporate revenues, to nearly 35% of total corporate revenues.

	Our tenure at SkyMall.com produced the most profitable time in SkyMall history.

definitely different.