Company: The Control Group, San Diego, CA
Company Description: Created in 2011, The Control Group is one of the fastest-growing technology companies headquartered in San Diego. Their expertise is in web development and internet marketing. The company is the developer of InstantCheckmate.com, one of the top people search engines in the world. Core to the company culture is its reach into the community to make a positive impact by volunteering.
Nomination Category: Information Technology Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Information Technology Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Information Technology Team of the Year

Tell the story about what this nominated team has achieved since January 1, 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.

The Control Group, one of the fastest growing technology companies headquartered in San Diego, is a web development and internet marketing company. The company is the developer of InstantCheckmate.com, one of the most highly-trafficked websites in the U.S. and also one of the top people search engines in the world. The Control Group has built a solid infrastructure which serves as a base to the company’s highly successful products. The team that makes up the company is always looking for game changing opportunities in this ever changing Information Technology industry. Instant Checkmate, a background check service, deals with millions of public records that must be pulled into a report within a matter of seconds. With so much data that the team deals with on a daily basis, they have had to come up with remarkable solutions for data storage, hosting, and high-performance searching.

The team has been able to use information technology in a way that has created major breakthroughs for the company, which in turn, allowed for exponential growth and profitability. By focusing on research and development, they have made drastic changes that have saved the company an immense amount of time, money, and resources. One big project that the team helped to initiate was the SEO Directory for the company’s flagship product, Instant Checkmate. Originally, the directory was projected to require the utilization of 240 servers, which was undoubtedly very expensive to maintain. After fourteen days of research and development, the team was able to move the entire directory onto one server in only fourteen additional days of design and development. The entire project was completed while keeping the SEO Directory live on production the entire time. This one server manages 300 million pages of dynamic content, which makes this project success astonishing.

Another project they took on was the Split Testing System. The original Split Testing System had an issue with exploring versus exploiting. In other words, Test A and Test B would run 50/50, and if one test was constantly losing, it still showed up half of the time which meant wasted profitability. Manual updates to the winning test was too slow of a process, and the team saw the potential of the major improvements that could be made. With the new Split Testing System they had built, they were able to fix the explore versus exploit issue with an algorithm they created after two months of R&D and forty-five days of development. This algorithm exploits the winning test the entire time while managing to explore at the same time. Overall, The Control Group has created such a successful split testing system that the number of variations tested is greater than the number of grains of sand on the Earth’s surface.

Analytics is an important part of every company to judge how the company/product is doing. The Control Group team has created an in-house analytics system for the company that can handle 40 million messages per second which is exponentially faster than Apache Kafka which can only handle 8 million messages per second. Kafka is the main technology utilized by companies such as LinkedIn and Twitter and the in-house analytics system operates at 5 times that capability. That alone shows just how powerful and innovative the team is.

These are just a few examples of the huge wins for the company creating and using game changing technology. The company, and the team that makes up the company, are always looking for ways to not only keep up but set the standards and be key runners for the information technology industry. It is one of the reasons why The Control Group is so successful in its marketing and technology abilities.

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominated team since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

* Created one of the most cost-effective in-house split testing systems the company has ever seen
* Created an in-house analytics system that can handle 40 million messages per second
* Within one year, stabilized the company’s main flagship product by drastically decreasing downtime
* Revamped the SEO Directory for Instant Checkmate. This one server manages 300 million pages of dynamic content.
* Fully implemented traditional Scrum processes that keep all team members heavily involved in project lifecycle
* Winner of Union Tribune 2014 Top Workplaces Award
* To be featured on Innovations TV with Ed Begley, Jr. on Discovery networks, Fox networks, Dish network and global syndication of over 60 Million potential viewers for technological innovations based around Instant Checkmate
* Instant Checkmate website has more than 1.5 million unique visits/day
* Developers and innovators behind one of the most highly trafficked websites in the world