Mary Kay exec says Web site more than a pretty interface

International cosmetics giant Mary Kay, a privately held company with more than $1 billion in revenue, credits its online presence for processing 85% of sales placed by its army of consultants or directly by consumers - up from just 10% a few years back. Chief Architect for E-Business Barry Bloom spoke with Network World Senior Writer Denise Dubie about the technology behind Mary Kay's online evolution (you can also get more details on Mary Kay's use of Web application management software).

What exactly does a chief architect for e-business do?

It varies. I am involved in architecture meetings around how we're going to lay out the next version of our applications across the network to what servers we're going to purchase. I'm involved in discussions around the deployment of our SAN as well as our Internet connectivity to the load-balancing technology we use. I am responsible for our adoption of [Microsoft].Net. We have probably 50 different Web applications that support our sales force, and we have an extensive deployment process for moving new versions of those applications into our production environment. I created that deployment process, and I'm involved in what we call our release process on a day-to-day basis. I'm also a very hands-on kind of architect, so if there are problems with our production environment I'm typically involved in trying to resolve them.

In the past, a typical Mary Kay consultant didn't have access to the Internet and the company didn't have a large Web presence. But in the past few years it's amazing how vigorously they've adopted it. To go from less than 10% of your orders coming from electronic means to 85% coming off the Web in a three-year period is huge.

How much of the IT infrastructure is dedicated to the Web site?

The 700 servers [and 2,000 desktops] we have support everything, including corporate [applications]. There are 200 servers involved with our Web presence. We started with about 20 servers dedicated to our Web presence. In late 1998 through 1999, we went from 20 to 200 in six months. We totally underestimated how many servers we were going to need, and we totally underestimated the adoption rate. There was this period of time [when] we were just blowing up our architecture every two months, trying to cope with the load. It was a big challenge because the executives and the management didn't always support that. We weren't given this big chunk of money up front. It wasn't until we proved that we needed something that we got it. Today, we're finally built out. We run a 16-processor Unisys [system outfitted with] SQL Server as our back end for all of our Web stuff.

What types of servers do you have?

Predominantly Windows [but also VMS, Solaris and other servers]. We use a mixture of Compaq, Dell, IBM and Unisys servers. There are probably 50 different configurations from duals with 512 megabytes of RAM to 16 processor boxes with 16 gigabytes of RAM. We have spent a lot of our time trying to leverage higher processor servers so that we can have less of them. We just went through a big server-consolidation phase moving to [Microsoft] .Net and we reduced our overall server count by about 30, which was a lot.

What is the cost and the expected ROI with your server consolidation?

We used to have 46 servers to run our Web applications for our sales force, and once our .Net migration is complete we will have 20. This is for a number of reasons: .Net is compiled, and it scales up better. We are moving from dual-processor servers to quad-processor servers. .Net is more stable so we can afford to run all our applications on one server type - those 20 servers are duplicates of one another and share the load.

Any advice for others looking into server consolidation?