By Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 9/11/98

Walk into the headquarters of a company that's building one of the Web's most advanced e-commerce sites and you'll be confronted with techies playing pool, screams from someone losing his Sega Genesis game and an array of workers sporting jester hats.

This is The Motley Fool, home to the country's nouveau online financial advisory firm. And while most think of Wall Street pundits as a bunch of buttoned-down suits, employees at this one-time America Online venture are more comfortable in South Park T-shirts and jeans. After all, this is the company that has made its name from being, well ... Foolish.

But start talking about the future of the company's FoolMart online store and Chief Technical Fool Dwight Gibbs draws you into the company's radio studio/boardroom. In walks Jill Kianka, an M.B.A. from Georgetown University, who dodged the traditional world of high finance to create what Gibbs hopes will become one of the company's most profitable endeavors. In fact, Gibbs says that FoolMart sales will account for half of the company's revenue within a couple of years, complementing the revenue pulled in by the company through consulting and other services.

But he knows that just selling jester hats, the company's staple promotional item, will not help The Motley Fool reach its financial goals.

The real money is in selling more daily e-mail subscriptions, portfolio tracking software and reports. To deliver these products reliably and bill customers efficiently, The Motley Fool has had to embark on a $35,000 upgrade of its Web site hardware, software and bandwidth. And the company no longer can rely on AOL's e-commerce infrastructure, given that The Motley Fool created FoolMart last year after spinning off its own Web site last year.

Taking on a "fool" load

FoolMart has been operating on a single Pentium Pro 200 Dell Server that sports 120M bytes of RAM and runs Microsoft's Site Server Commerce Edition 2.0. That server has been connected to a similar machine running Microsoft's SQL Server database and shared by departments across the company.

"Other applications within Fool headquarters such as application development were taking up resources on the SQL box," Gibbs says. "This would leave FoolMart begging for resources."

And customers were left waiting to place orders, he adds.

The new system, which is still being installed, is anchored by a pair of Compaq 3000 servers. One machine powered by a single 333-MHz Pentium II processor and outfitted with 256M bytes of RAM will host Version 3.0 of Microsoft's Site Server electronic commerce software. This machine is linked through a firewall to a dual Pentium II processor box running SQL Server 6.5. The database server is dedicated to FoolMart's needs, housing the online store's customer and order databases.

"We switched over to more powerful machines for increased reliability and to handle spikes," Gibbs says.

The upgrade to Site Server 3.0 provides the site with better security features, including support for Secure Sockets Layer 2.0 and 3.0. "It allows for a more secure connection between the browser and the server, and better control over the purchase pipeline," Gibbs says. "We can customize the purchase process as much or as little as we want."

Gibbs emphasizes he's not fooling around when it comes to security. "You shouldn't be lulled into a false sense of security just because you have a firewall," he says.

In fact, Gibbs says administrators should go beyond simple reliance on firewalls: they should lock down their database servers and limit the number of people who have access. "You should perform regular audits of your database servers, too," he says.

To accommodate the increased traffic on FoolMart and the main site at www.motleyfool.com, Gibbs is boosting the company's pipeline from three T-1s to a fractional T-3, offering between 9M bit/sec and 12M bit/sec throughput. Gibbs says that should be enough to handle the more than million page requests a day the Motley Fool site now gets.

The wisdom of a Fool

No matter what technology a company is using, Kianka says the key for a company to be successful in e-commerce is knowing what types of products it is going to be offering and optimizing its infrastructure accordingly.

For instance, if the company is going to sell online products such as e-mail subscriptions and software downloads, the company needs to make sure it has the hardware, software and bandwidth to support them.

The Motley Fool uses a homemade Pentium II machine with 64M bytes of RAM running Linux to send 60,000 messages a day to its newsletter subscribers.

"The Linux machine is not even breaking a sweat," Gibbs says. "It's a shame right now we can't put out enough e-mail to push it to capacity."

Gibbs says e-mail is a great way to increase revenue without too much additional overhead. For instance, individual subscriptions to The Motley Fool's various daily digests run around $100 annually.

Gibbs optimized the company's order management software - a combination of Dydacomp's Mail Order Manager and some homespun code - and Site Server to take the orders straight from the user through to fulfillment. The customer inputs his order, Site Server then transfers this information to the order management software, which sends it to the Linux machine to generate the e-mail. If the customer wants a book, then the order management software sends the request to Amazon.com. Other requests, such as for hats and T-shirts, are sent to a fulfillment house in West Virginia, Kianka says.

Originally, The Motley Fool relied on a third party to do its credit card transaction processing, but Kianka says it was cheaper and easier to bring this task in-house. "The credit card processing companies charge for every little request," she says.

Credit card buying is still a sore subject for Gibbs and Kianka. Both scoff at suggestions that buying over the 'Net isn't safe.

"People give their card out to people over the phone and in restaurants all the time," Gibbs says. "This is a machine talking to another machine." There is little human involvement, he adds.

What has Gibbs learned from the whole experience so far?

"You have to have multiple disciplines to put together a store," he says. "You need someone who's tech-savvy, but you also need someone who's product-savvy. Trying it any other way would be foolish."

By Sandra Gittlen Network World Fusion, 9/11/98

Taking on a "fool" load

The wisdom of a Fool

By Sandra Gittlen
Network World Fusion, 9/11/98