BELLEVUE, Wash., April 28, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Tier 3, an enterprise cloud platform company, today announced that Channel IQ, the leading provider of online pricing intelligence and channel management solutions, has selected the company's self-optimizing enterprise infrastructure to run its mission-critical applications and services.

Channel IQ, which provides manufacturers and retailers real-time, on-demand applications for product pricing visibility within online sales channels, spent a year evaluating and testing different infrastructure providers before selecting Tier 3 for its agile platform that delivers all the benefits of cloud computing without the associated risks and performance compromises seen with other solutions.

"We were looking for a utility-based model that would scale with our business as it grew and also allow us the freedom to focus on our core business—namely, our customers," said Wes Shepherd, founder and CEO of Channel IQ. "The Tier 3 platform provides the speed and performance, enterprise level security, and availability in a mission-critical environment that we can trust."

With more than 60 brand name manufacturing and retailing customers using Channel IQ to provide visibility into online channels, pricing and competition, Channel IQ needed a cloud platform provider it could trust to scale with dynamic pricing environments and its rapidly growing enterprise customer base that demands high availability.

"As innovative application providers move services online and into the cloud, they have to overcome new hurdles to winning customer trust and customer business. Their customers will expect better quality of service, uptime and support. To deliver this, application providers will need a cloud platform provider they can trust to keep the lights on," said Jared Wray, chief technology officer for Tier 3. "Our mission is to enable Channel IQ with a production-ready cloud environment that could scale on demand with an SLA that ensured they would be 'on' 100 percent of the time for their customers."

"We built our technology from the ground up with mission-critical enterprise applications in mind," Wray said. "Companies with high performance applications, like Channel IQ, need predictive scaling that can quite literally meet any performance scenario you can imagine."

About Tier 3

Tier 3 is the enterprise cloud provider with the smarter platform. Tier 3 goes beyond traditional cloud offerings to provide agile, self-optimizing infrastructure that enables enterprises to run their mission-critical applications and services with complete confidence. Enterprises realize the benefits of lower TCO, dynamic scaling and built-in disaster recovery without sacrificing control, security and performance. Our customers count on Tier 3 for the flexibility and freedom to focus on their core business. For more information, please visit www.tier3.com.

About Channel IQ

Channel IQ is the leading provider of online retail intelligence solutions to manufacturers, distributors and retailers. Channel IQ provides real-time, online promotion and pricing information, empowering major manufacturers and retailers like Crutchfield, Olympus, Harman Kardon and Denon & Marantz to quickly and profitably handle channel issues and competitive situations. Only Channel IQ combines integrated reporting, interactive applications and services to enable manufacturers and retailers to automatically act on real-time data.  Channel IQ solutions are the result of cutting edge technology combined with decades of industry experience in channel management, distribution, online retail and manufacturing. For more information, visit www.channeliq.com.

SOURCE Tier 3