Pythian Receives Oracle North America Titan Award for Oracle Exadata Solution

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA--(Marketwire - Oct. 3, 2011) - Oracle OpenWorld - The Pythian Group, Inc., a leading provider of remote database infrastructure services and a Platinum level member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), has been honored with an Oracle North America Titan Award for the Oracle Exadata solution it planned, deployed and manages on behalf of online marketing corporation LinkShare in New York. The award was presented at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

The Oracle North America Titan Award, which recognizes partners for their ability to deliver Oracle solutions and services that drive business and customer value, is an acknowledgement of Pythian's expertise and service quality. An Oracle partner since 1999, providing services across the entire Oracle technology stack, Pythian holds seven Specializations within the OPN Specialized program, including Oracle Exadata.

"Oracle's valued partner community in North America continues to reach new levels of expertise and innovation in developing and implementing Oracle technologies and delivering value-added services to joint customers," said Ted Bereswill, Oracle Senior Vice President of North America Alliances and Channels. "This year's Titan Award winners reflect the powerful combination that Oracle and our Specialized partners bring to customers across the enterprise and distinct industries."

Pythian applied its expertise with Oracle solutions to solve a set of interrelated challenges for LinkShare, which processes more than one million transactions a day for Fortune 500 businesses. The online marketing firm's existing infrastructure was heavily strained by mounting volumes of data—causing response-time slowdowns, capacity issues and difficulty maintaining real-time data updates. Pythian recommended and facilitated LinkShare's migration to the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, which is built specifically for data warehousing and online transaction processing.

"You can't typically find one team with the end-to-end skills needed for this type of project," said Jonathan Levine, Chief Operating Officer at LinkShare Corporation. "We were dealing with storage, database administration, network administration and systems administration. Pythian has expertise in every one of those areas. So they were able to troubleshoot, support operating system and storage configuration, handle partitioning, compression, data warehouse design and optimization. Knowing their high quality of service, expertise and history of successful projects, we were confident in calling on them for help."

The benefits of LinkShare's deployed Oracle Exadata solution include accelerated response times (up to 10 times faster than before), real-time data updates every five minutes, growth capacity and cost savings.

"Oracle Exadata was the ideal solution for LinkShare," explained Paul Vallee, Pythian Founder and Executive Chairman. "By redesigning their data warehouse, we were able to leverage Oracle Exadata's features to their full capacity. We're proud of the solution we delivered, and honored to be rewarded for that work with an Oracle North America Titan Award."

In addition to Oracle Exadata, Pythian holds Specializations in Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Data Warehousing, Oracle Database, Oracle Database Performance Tuning, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Linux. Pythian is demonstrating its expertise this week with 8 presentations at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco. Pythian's newest Oracle Exadata customers include TravelClick and a major financial services company, both located in New York.

About Pythian

Pythian is a global database and application infrastructure services company for Oracle, MySQL and SQL Server. Since 1997, companies have entrusted Pythian to keep their database infrastructures running efficiently and to help them strategically align their IT and business goals. Pythian's unparalleled DBA skills, mature methodologies, best practices and tools enable clients to do more with fewer resources. Pythian's corporate headquarters is in Ottawa, Canada, with offices worldwide. To find out more, visit Pythian online at http://www.pythian.com.

About Oracle PartnerNetwork

Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Specialized is the latest version of Oracle's partner program, providing partners with tools to better develop, sell and implement Oracle solutions. OPN Specialized offers resources to train and support specialized knowledge of Oracle's products and solutions and has evolved to recognize Oracle's growing product portfolio, partner base and business opportunity. Key to the latest enhancements to OPN is the ability for partners to differentiate through Specializations. Specializations are achieved through competency development, business results, expertise and proven success. To find out more, visit www.oracle.com/partners.

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