Meet Our Customers: Piriform

A short interview with Rafal Girycki, Senior Developer and Team/Project Leader at Piriform, a global provider of award-winning software that makes computer run ‘Clean, Safe and Fast’.

Let’s talk about your organization. What is your core business?
“Our company is a global provider of software that makes computers run ‘Clean, Safe and Fast’. Along with our flagship product CCleaner, which is now available both for Mac and PC in different versions for both home and business/enterprise users, Piriform also developed Defraggler, a user-friendly tool for hard drives defragmentation, Recuva, a utility for lost files recovery, and Speccy, an advanced system information tool.
Agomo is the first cloud-based PC maintenance solution developed by Piriform. It brings CCleaner, Defraggler and other useful tools to the cloud”.

As expected data transfer is performed at the speed of light, communication is highly secure and a single server instance can handle thousands of simultaneous connections. This all proves Lightstreamer really deserves its name

Rafal Girycki

— Senior Developer and Team/Project Leader at Piriform

Could you let us know any further information?
“Piriform is a privately owned UK software house, with offices in London, New York and Eastern Europe. At Piriform we create award-winning software to make computers faster, more secure and with increased privacy. Our software is used and trusted by millions, in 195 countries. CCleaner alone has been installed more than 1 Billion times onto nearly 25% of all the PCs in the world, and has been chosen by over 1 million business customers”.

What do you do for Piriform and what are you responsible for?
“I am a senior software developer and team leader here at Piriform. Previously I was responsible for CCleaner Network product. I am now responsible for our brand new cloud-based product – Agomo. Together with other developers and quality assurance engineers we are creating the future of cloud-based computer management for both home and business/enterprise users”.

Agomo is the first project in which Piriform successfully integrated Lightstreamer. Would you please share more details?
“Agomo is a web application designed to bring our thoroughly tested desktop products to the cloud, enabling you to manage multiple computers remotely. It allows you to monitor several aspects (including stats, components, memory usage, disk space etc), remove junk files and registry information, defrag your hard drives, and add/remove software application wherever you are, locally or remotely from any common browser. All those tasks have to be delivered to appropriate computers, where a compact, highly secure client application is installed. Lightstreamer is used to deliver information about those actions to agents, working as an efficient carrier for remote monitoring information and task execution”.

Does Lightstreamer also push data from clients’ agent to monitoring dashboards (e.g for IT administrators or Piriform)?
“No, we use one-way only communication to deliver information from the cloud to the agents”.

Who is the typical user of Agomo? Who could get the most from it?
“Agomo could be useful in different scenarios, ranging from helping friends without leaving the sofa, to managing entire campus-wide IT networks”.
“For professional/enterprise contexts it saves time and effort on a number of actions that have historically required regular IT maintenance tasks, as it helps to keep a number of machines clean from errors, prevent crashes, keeps older PCs running longer and reduces downtime and IT supports costs. It definitely helps improving the hardware ROI and enhancing the end-users productivity overall”.

In which technologies Agomo has been developed, both on the front-end and the back-end side?
“The front-end web application has been developed using ASP.NET technology. Behind the scene we use many different technologies including SQL servers, Lightstreamer servers, distributed caches, mail delivery services etc. This environment requires a lot of high-performance and reliable hardware. Piriform decided to trust Amazon Web Services environment and its services which are widely used across the Agomo system. The client agent, on the other hand, is developed in C++ and using standard libraries to ensure high speed, compact size of all executables and small memory footprint on all supported operating systems. Such combination guarantees high performance and overall efficiency of the system”.

Does Agomo work on tablets and smartphones as well? Does your roadmap include native apps for this service?
“No, at this moment we don’t have mobile clients however Agomo roadmap includes Android and iPhone clients as well as OS X client”.

What other features of Lightstreamer are you taking benefit from (e.g. data throttling, low latency, bandwidth management, security, smart proxy traversal, etc.)?
“Currently we only use basic functionality of Lightstreamer servers which is data delivery between Agomo system components. However we are sure that as Agomo grows and gains more users we will benefit from integrating more Lightstreamer features into our system”.

Is your product or service visible at any URL (publicly or registration based)?
“Agomo is available at www.agomo.com. Users can register their interest in Agomo, we will then invite them to use the beta version of the system. Open registrations will be available at a later time”.

What we could expect from the next versions of Agomo? Could you please shed some light on the product roadmap?
“We plan to integrate other Piriform desktop products soon (Recuva) as well as to add other features which currently don’t have their equivalents in Piriform’s desktop products. Users love surprises and we’ve got some prepared so I’m not going to talk about them right now but one of the upcoming features include powerful scripting mechanism which will allow users to automatically manage their computers based on some defined conditions and the state of their machines’ health”.

Why Piriform opted for Lightstreamer among many other products, both commercial and free?
“Thorough research on push servers indicated that Lightstreamer technology is used by the most valuable players in IT. And since Piriform is one of them there was no other choice [smiles]”.

Are you considering extending your Lightstreamer usage in other products, be them available or still in a development phase?
“At the moment there are no such plans but our positive experience with Lightstreamer in Agomo means we will definitely consider this in the future”.

We would be very grateful if you would like to provide a short recommendation to testify your experience with Lightstreamer technology and its support team.
“Lightstreamer turned out to be Piriform’s best choice for delivering small pieces of information between our system components. As expected data transfer is performed at the speed of light, communication is highly secure and a single server instance can handle thousands of simultaneous connections. This all proves Lightstreamer really deserves its name”.