Specific Media
Background to the project
Specific Media ( specificmedia.com ) is an innovative global technology and online media company that enables advertisers to target audiences through advanced proprietary demographic, behavioural, contextual, geographic and retargeting technologies across a Premium Network of name brand publishers with unprecedented scale and accuracy. Established in 1999 Specific Media has experienced rapid growth to the point where the company is now the world’s fastest growing interactive media company and is ranked among comScore’s top ten advertising networks, with an expanding client roster that includes 300 of the top Fortune 500 companies.
As an on-line media company Specific Media rely on effective IT systems. The software critical to the company’s business success was developed in–house and a small team had managed the supporting IT infrastructure. But the enormous growth of the business was putting a real strain on the ad serving and ad management systems. Steve McCartney, Specific Media’s Senior Vice President of Engineering realised that their existing systems management techniques weren’t going to scale and that the company needed help to design and implement a data centre and network infrastructure that would enable Specific Media to continue the pace of expansion over the next 5 years.
The challenge and scope of the project
Steve’s challenge was to design a platform that would scale and take them forward and build up their in-house skills, whilst at the same time ensuring that day to day operations were not impacted; something that would be beyond the capacity of their existing small team.
Technical Growth was tasked with the design and implementation of a modular data centre and network infrastructure that would scale up across multiple sites. The project also involved the complete design and rebuild of two data centres. In total the project took 7 months from start to finish with approximately two months spent on the design, two months on procurement and 3 months on implementation.
The technical and business benefits
For Steve the results have been impressive. There was an immediate improvement in response times and the way the applications performed, even with the greatly increased volumes they were experiencing. The pressure on the operations team also declined with a sharp drop in system issues and alerts, easier rollouts of new applications and improved hardware upgrades and system reconfiguration capabilities. But for Steve the biggest benefit is for the business. “Specific Media experienced its largest volumes last month. The work completed by Technical Growth will enable us to grow as a business. Driving new business is now a sales problem not a technical problem” he commented.
Technical Growth’s Value
Steve is also clear on the importance of the role played by Technical Growth. “We had an aggressive timescale and pretty tight budgets” he commented, “but I am pleased to say that they came in on time and to budget”. He attributes this to exceptionally thorough project management and exceptional communications capabilities. “ With US and European responsibilities I have a very busy schedule, but very quickly I was comfortable to let Technical Growth run the project week to week.” Steve was also impressed with their ability to communicate very technical design and implementation issues at a level everyone could understand.
Summing up Steve felt that Technical Growth’s strengths are founded on a very solid process; he particularly mentioned their specification gathering and very thorough provisioning procedures; their deep technical knowledge and, as he put it, “a ruthless organisation throughout the lifecycle of the project.”
