Digital River Opens European Data Center
 

MINNEAPOLIS -- Digital River, Inc. (NASDAQ: DRIV), a global leader in e-commerce outsourcing, today announced that it has opened a new European data center. The remote site, which has been integrated with Digital River's two existing U.S. data centers, is being used to help the company manage the online stores and e-commerce operations it hosts on behalf of its more than 34,000 clients. The launch of Digital River's third data center has allowed the company to further extend fail-safe measures across its e-commerce infrastructure, respond to growing levels of e-commerce transactions and create more efficiency in the processing of international online orders.

"Because we are responsible for the day-to-day operations of tens of thousands of e-commerce sites, it is mission critical for us to have a technology infrastructure in place that is highly scalable, reliable and secure," said Joel Ronning, Digital River's CEO. "To that end, we've designed our e-commerce system to respond on a moments notice to peaks in online traffic, periods of seasonality and unpredictable world events that might impact Internet activities. With our European data center in place, we have added 33 percent more bandwidth to our e-commerce system and the capacity to quickly and seamlessly balance loads across multiple continents. Enhancements such as these, offer our clients increased assurance that their online stores will be up and running 24X7X365 and generating revenues even during heavy volume periods."

Similar to its two existing U.S. data centers, Digital River's new European site is architected to support a shared infrastructure application and at least 50 percent available excess capacity to meet increasing and varying transactions levels. The e-commerce servers located across the data centers are set up in independent "pods" or grids. With pods of servers running in multiple data centers around the world, the company can repurpose its servers and quickly move loads not only from one pod to another, but also from one geography to another. The company successfully leveraged this integrated architecture during the latest virus outbreak to handle the peak processing demands of some of its largest software publishing clients.

"Our pod architecture acts as a bulletproof mechanism, giving us ultimate flexibility in hosting and managing e-commerce operations on behalf of our clients," said Marty Boos, Digital River's CIO. "At any time, an independent pod can act as a host to thousands of e-commerce sites. Then, minutes later, we can repurpose the pod by isolating a single client site for support while relocating other e-commerce sites to other pods without service interruption. With our pod architecture, we have achieved nearly 100 percent system uptime and eliminated the need for scheduled maintenance. The end result is that we've been able to maximize cost-savings and revenue opportunities for our clients as well as our company."

In addition to expanding its pod architecture, Digital River plans to use its newest data center to improve service to its European customer base. The company is also leveraging the remote site to address changing and complicated value-added taxes (VAT) requirements. Based on the European Union (EU) directives that went into effect in July 2003, EU and non-EU sellers failing to collect VAT on the online sales of digital products and services to European customers can be subject to penalties. With a data center located in Europe, Digital River has been able to simplify the collection, reporting and remittance of VAT, a costly process that it manages on behalf of its clients.


About Digital River, Inc.
Digital River, Inc., a global leader in e-commerce outsourcing, builds and manages online businesses for nearly 34,000 companies worldwide. Its e-commerce solution and infrastructure are designed to help companies of all sizes maximize online revenues as well as cut the costs and reduce the risks associated with running an e-commerce operation. Digital River's international e-commerce services include site development and hosting, order management, fraud prevention, site merchandising, reporting and analytics, product fulfillment, e-marketing and multi-lingual customer service. Digital River's clients include 3M, ACT!, Autodesk, H&R Block, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Motorola, Novell, Staples.com and Symantec.

For more information, please visit: www.digitalriver.com.