Zeus Technology, Blue State Digital and the Barack Obama phenomenon

ZXTM ensures outstanding service and consistent availability during peak fundraising activities

Santa Clara, CA, 27 October, 2008 – Zeus Technology, a leading provider of software and virtual appliance based traffic management solutions, today announced that Blue State Digital (BSD), the online political and fundraising strategy provider behind such political campaigns as Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the White House, is employing Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) to ensure that customers receive outstanding service and consistent availability during peak fundraising activities.

For Senator Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, BSD was retained to manage the online fundraising, constituency-building, issue advocacy, and peer-to-peer online networking. To date, the campaign has used the BSD Online Tools to mobilize well over a million donors to contribute over $200 million online, to motivate over 850,000 social networking participants, and to create and promote more than 50,000 events across the U.S.

Zeus Technology’s ZXTM load balancing solutions and application delivery and acceleration software enable organizations to better manage their data across their infrastructure, whether physical or virtual.  ZXTM allows organizations to easily set policies to control traffic flow to their web enabled applications, helping to create, manage and deliver exceptional online services. 

 “By implementing Zeus software, BSD can manage applications, customize content caching for each customer by page or prioritize application responses by activities or even donation values,” said Travis Reed, General Manager, Americas, Zeus Technology.  “When an application becomes heavily loaded, BSD can use ZXTM to precisely limit or prioritize traffic to particular parts of the web application, letting its most important functions continue unimpeded.” 
BSD installed ZXTM in December 2007 using TrafficScript™ for content caching and compression on its web site. During the duration of ZXTM deployment, BSD’s overall site traffic increased by 400 percent, yet with ZXTM, traffic to their backend nodes has only increased by 75 percent, while simultaneously reducing the burden on the applications by 80 percent.

“When it comes to supporting our customers’ fundraising drives, ZXTM has been worth every penny,” said Leigh Heyman, Lead System Administrator at Blue State Digital. “We’ve had days when we’ve raised phenomenal amounts of money (for example, seven figure amounts in 24 hours and six figure amounts per hour) and we’re able to keep the donations coming in for our customers without disruption. We couldn’t have done this without ZXTM.”

ZXTM –based products are available as Software (for Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD servers), as Hardware Appliances and as Virtual Appliances (for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 and Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2).

About Blue State Digital
Blue State Digital (BSD) is a leader in online fundraising, advocacy, social networking, and constituency development programs for nonprofit organizations, political candidates and causes, and corporations. Since our founding in 2004,we’ve delivered successfully on the promise of the Internet to over 200 satisfied clients, including Obama for America, Wal-Mart Watch, the Alliance for Climate Protection, and the Communications Workers of America, raising over $200 million in contributions to date and generating tens of millions of online signups and actions.

Based in Washington, D.C., BSD also has offices in Boston, New York, and California.

For more information, visit: www.bluestatedigital.com

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