Digital ad tech company AudienceScience has significantly expanded its global infrastructure footprint using Internap’s scalable colocation and route-optimised Performance IP connectivity services. The solution enables AudienceScience to meet rapidly growing customer demands – including a 12X increase in the volume of real-time digital ad transactions – while delivering optimal control and performance for its AudienceScience® Helios enterprise advertising management platform, which serves leading brands and advertisers around the world. An Internap customer since 2006, AudienceScience added colocation and Performance IP services throughout 2014 in Dallas, Seattle, Secaucus, N.J., Amsterdam and Singapore, and expanded existing services in Frankfurt and Hong Kong.
AudienceScience® Helios is an integrated, SaaS-based enterprise advertising management platform that provides organisations with complete control, transparency and efficiency across their entire ad spend. It enables advertisers to analyse and manage audience data, derive campaign insights and optimise digital media buying, all in one place. With the volume of media transactions on its platform increasing by 1,100 percent in the past year alone, AudienceScience needed to substantially expand its worldwide infrastructure footprint to meet increased demand and guarantee performance for its highly data-intensive real-time ad bidding workloads.
After evaluating possible infrastructure scenarios, including commodity public cloud services, AudienceScience decided that an extension of Internap’s global colocation and Performance IP services would provide the best fit and cost controls for its exponential data and compute growth needs. Additionally, AudienceScience moved its existing infrastructure from numerous providers and consolidated its worldwide infrastructure footprint with Internap. Internap’s colocation and Performance IP will allow AudienceScience to scale to meet continued customer and ad transaction growth and deliver the speed and availability required to support its “fast big data” workloads. With a colocation model, AudienceScience owns all of its hardware and maintains complete control over its proprietary technology while gaining maximum cost-efficiency for its data-intensive but consistent workloads. In partnership with Internap’s onsite support team, AudienceScience engineers are able to monitor, maintain and troubleshoot their operations. Internap’s customer portal gives AudienceScience granular visibility and cloud-like remote management of its server environment and network bandwidth. Internap also provides AudienceScience with the future flexibility to adapt to a hybrid IT infrastructure approach, leveraging public cloud and bare-metal hosting as its price/performance needs evolve.
“Our business relies on letting our customers run end-to-end ad campaigns on our platform, with the ability to carry out data-driven media buying in real-time,” said Peter Szabo, director of technical operations at AudienceScience. “With Internap, we’re able to achieve the high level of scale, control and latency-optimised global reach that we require. Internap’s route-optimised IP connectivity provides optimal performance levels and lowest latency for our Helios users around the world, ensuring that they’re able to reliably manage massive stores of their proprietary data, build an audience and target it in real time across all ad channels – anytime, from anywhere in the world.”
Internap’s colocation service runs on high-density, scalable infrastructure that supports up to 18kW per rack. It also features a concurrently maintainable design, on-site data center engineers, advanced security features and remote management self-service tools. Internap’s global Performance IP service with patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology evaluates available service networks in real time. The result is intelligent routing of AudienceScience customer traffic over the fastest Internet path, ensuring a seamless experience, regardless of the end user’s geographic location. This route-optimised Internet connectivity has allowed AudienceScience to optimise processing of audience and advertising performance data, as well as accelerate processing of media transactions.
“Real-time analytics workloads like those associated with ad platforms and exchanges are becoming exponentially more data intensive as consumer targeting becomes more sophisticated,” said Mike Higgins, senior vice president of data center services at Internap. “At Internap, we’ve seen a 55 percent increase in the number of ad tech customers since 2011 as a result of our unique ability to address these demands by delivering flexible, scalable Internet infrastructure with the consistently high performance levels that ad tech and other performance-reliant organisations demand.”