Dan A. Richards
VP of Constant Contact Labs
Responsible for leading the engineering and operations teams at Constant Contact since July 1999, Daniel Richards has assumed the newly-created role of vice president of Constant Contact Labs. The mission of Constant Contact Labs is to identify and prototype new technologies for use in future products. With more than 25 years of development and leadership experience in developing software for all phases of the software development lifecycle, Dan will be responsible for coordinating the development efforts of Constant Contacts Labs and working collaboratively with other internal organizations to bring new technologies into mainstream development.
A key contributor to the design, development and management of Constant Contact's offerings, Dan was a pioneer behind offering Constant Contact in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model to small organizations.
Prior to Constant Contact, Dan served as a principal developer and vice president of engineering at Segue Software Inc. (now Borland Software Corporation), which specializes in automated testing applications. He has also held leadership positions at Mercury Computer Systems Inc. and Apollo Computer, Inc. (now HP).
Dan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Binghamton University.
Session:
The Evolution of a Very High Scale Web Application
Constant Contact is the leading provider of Email Marketing for small businesses. As a pioneer in the delivery of end user software via the SaaS model, Constant Contact has developed and evolved its system which today provides the service on behalf of over 250,000 businesses worldwide.
As a very high volume system, we have learned many things about meeting the business needs, scaling our system and evolving our architecture. We continue to look at this as an on-going effort as the business continues to grow.
In this session we will share the historical evolution of our technology platform, share our particular scaling challenges including lessons learned, our development methodologies and discuss some of the future changes that our platform will be going through to meet the scaling demands of the business in the future.
