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Have you ever been on a cruise or ferry? If so, there’s a good chance that your arrangements were processed by Versonix — an innovative Silicon Valley company supporting the travel industry for over three decades.
Versonix started using AlwaysUp way back in 2012.
Why does Versonix use AlwaysUp?
At Versonix, we’ve developed several proprietary Windows executables and Java programs to support Seaware — our market-leading cruise reservation system that processes 20 million bookings each year. And over time, AlwaysUp has grown to become an integral part of our day-to-day operations.
Most notably, AlwaysUp helps our business achieve the following:
100% uptime for important software
We install all our applications with AlwaysUp, to ensure that they are constantly up and running. The fact is that we can’t tolerate downtime, and we’ve largely eliminated that by using AlwaysUp.
Centralized application management
In the past, it was tricky to manage hundreds of programs serving dozens of environments across multiple servers. Our engineers were constantly fighting with RDP, Task Manager, the NET command and other Windows utilities.
But that’s all changed. By using AlwaysUp web service, we were able to connect our applications to a central, browser-based dashboard. And from there, we can stop, start or restart our any of our applications with a few clicks. It’s a very convenient solution — made possible by AlwaysUp!
What did you use before AlwaysUp?
We tried Microsoft’s free Srvany tool a few years ago. While it worked fine for making one application into a Windows Service, it’s quite impractical when you need to install hundreds. Furthermore, the lack of a GUI was a major shortcoming.
What are your favorite features of the software?
Beyond the basic “keep everything running 24/7” feature, our team relies on:
The Web Service API
By calling the AlwaysUp REST web services API, our middleware can stop, start or restart our applications programmatically. That flexible capability let’s us integrate AlwaysUp into our software development lifecycle, efficiently attending to maintenance tasks, software upgrades and more.
Tags
We tag each of our applications with the customer and environment it serves. We do that because it allows us to manage a set of related applications as a unit — both from AlwaysUp and from our web dashboard.
For example, we can easily stop all the executables supporting the QA environment because they’re tagged with “GRP_QA” in AlwaysUp. Without that grouping, we’d have to stop each application individually — a tedious process.
Any other comments?
Core Technologies has provided excellent support over the years. Whenever we’ve had a problem, you’ve jumped in quickly to resolve the issue. We really appreciate that professional response as we strive to support our own customers too.
We also appreciate the responsiveness of your development team. Even though your typical user isn’t running hundreds of applications like us, you’ve implemented several of our suggestions that make it easier to run the way that we do. Thanks for your help!
