Case Study

Cloud Advancement Services Enable a Marketing Analytics Company Drive Enterprise Agility and Improve Performance

Taking a multi-cloud approach to improve operations and reduce costs

Customer: Metamarkets Profile: A leading provider of interactive analytics for programmatic marketing. Customers such as Twitter, AOL, and Rubicon Project use the Metamarkets platform to drive their business performance

Services: Cloud Advancement

Size: 11-50 employees
Region: San Francisco, CA
Industry: Marketing and Advertising

Business Need

Metamarkets’ Promise to Clients Sets the Bar High

Metamarkets promises that their, “technology stack is built end-to-end for speed, flexibility, and the power to handle huge volumes of high dimensional ad data with an exploratory interface that enables users to pose questions in various ways, get answers immediately, and uncover insights that standard reporting systems can’t.” They also claim that, “The world’s largest programmatic platforms depend on Metamarkets to safeguard petabytes of their data and ensure that it’s always available when they need it.”

They then “up the ante” when they explain that their software, “wasn’t created just for speed; it was designed to scale seamlessly. And when there are hiccups, it’s built with redundancies to ensure it’s accessible.”

Solution and Approach

Having more than one connection to the internet from more than one carrier has been a standard practice for many, many years. If one carrier experiences an outage, work can continue using another.

Metamarkets’ challenge was not a connection problem. To achieve their high standards they had chosen to use Amazon Web Services (AWS). Some problems had arisen, but they didn’t realize how vulnerable their reputation for client service was until an outage that interrupted their services for several hours.

“Our clients use our service to serve their clients,” explains Metamarkets Platform Engineer Himadri Singh.

We provide our clients with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and they, in turn, have SLAs to meet with their clients.” The outage caused a significant lapse in their SLA.

The solution was obvious to Singh. The best way to assure continuous service in the event of another outage was to create a multi-cloud solution such that failure would result in failover to the other cloud provider with no lapse in client service levels.

While it was possible to create an on-premise solution using their own hardware to create a redundant solution between multiple cloud providers, Metamarkets had decided from the beginning to pursue a complete cloud strategy that would avoid the expense of owning and managing their own hardware.

As they began to discuss their challenge with other cloud providers, the folks at Google suggested that they speak with Synoptek about their Managed Performance Hub solution, which combines the world-class data centers and highest bandwidth connectivity available from Equinix with the most highly rated network management services from Synoptek.

From the outset, Synoptek’s Managed Performance Hub met Himadri Singh’s requirements. None of the hardware required to connect two major cloud providers together would have to be purchased by Metamarkets. Instead, Synoptek owned and operated the entire solution. Singh would later be even more impressed as Synoptek took only two days to deploy the entire solution.

Business Results

This solution provided unmatched flexibility in that it provided access to 1,400 Network Providers and 2,500 cloud providers globally, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Softlayer.

This not only increased network performance by physically locating data nearest to the users who needed it, but also by enabling high bandwidth connectivity using LAN cross-connects between public clouds, network service providers, data centers, and corporate offices which meaningfully increase performance and avoid thousands of dollars in network expenses for slower circuits.

Selecting to add Google as their second cloud provider allowed Metamarkets to easily mix public and private cloud solutions as they needed to without investing in any on-premise hardware. The possibility of future lapses in service to Metamarkets clients was all but eliminated.

We were impressed with Synoptek’s expertise and delivery

Not knowing exactly what to anticipate once AWS and Google were both supporting them, the Metamarkets team reports being very impressed in many important ways:

  • They were impressed by the two-day deployment by Synoptek’s engineers.
  • They were impressed with the response time from Synoptek on any inquiries.
  • They were impressed with the cost savings realized by deploying the Managed Performance Hub.
  • They were impressed by the way the Managed Performance Hub increased the performance of their network and content delivery overall.
  • They were impressed with how seamlessly the Managed Performance Hub failed over from AWS to Google and back. This was well beyond the level of reliability they were seeking!
  • They were impressed with the tools available to them to monitor, evaluate, and manage a hybrid solution.
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