Client Brief: Home Shopping Network

About Home Shopping Network (HSN)

HSN, an operating business of IAC/InterActiveCorp (Nasdaq: IACI), originated the electronic retailing concept in 1977 and has since evolved into a global multichannel retailing giant, offering thousands of unique products in fashion, beauty, home, jewelry and electronics. Customers who shop on HSN can find name brands such as Sony, Kodak, and Gateway Computers, as well as fashions from Nicole Miller, Nine West and Etienne Aigner. HSN's product offerings can be found across a number of retailing platforms including TV, where HSN reaches 89 million U.S. households and is now the 4th largest cable television network in the U.S.; the Internet, through its easy-to-use Web site, www.hsn.com; and catalogs, with its Cornerstone Brands portfolio of titles including Alsto's, Ballard Designs, Frontgate, Garnet Hill, Improvements, Smith and Noble, The Territory Ahead and TravelSmith. In 2004, HSN generated worldwide consolidated sales of $2.4 billion, answered 66 million calls and delivered 50 million packages worldwide.

Why Exadel

"By leveraging Exadel's expertise, we were able to achieve both business and technical value," said John Thompson, project manager at HSN. "After completing the first phase of our project, we have seen a significant decrease in the learning curve for our developers which has resulted in putting our team several weeks ahead of our development cycle. In addition, we were able to realize a significant cost savings that we would have needed to invest in commercial software and support."

Business Challenge

Home Shopping Network wanted to design and deploy a reliable, high-performance software infrastructure based on open source and java technologies
Realizing the company had minimal java and open source expertise, HSN quickly began a search for a strategic application development partner
HSN needed a partner that could maximize their developers productivity and development efforts at a minimal cost
HSN was also looking for a company with a business friendly licensing agreement

Business Solution

After evaluating dozens of application development software companies, HSN chose Exadel
The company's Exadel StudioPro, an advanced enterprise-level Web application development environment for leveraging open source, J2EE, and AJAX technologies within the Eclipse environment, proved easy-to-learn and easy-to-use for HSN developers
In addition to Exadel StudioPro, HSN also leveraged the Exadel Development Boost, an extensive professional services program that offers organizations a comprehensive means to integrate open source into their existing IT architectures and to accelerate business-critical software deployments

Business Results

HSN completed their project ahead of schedule and on budget
The In-house development team now has strong Java and open source understanding
A robust software infrastructure was provided to HSN for all future application development