Ad tech companies rely on Internap’s bare metal servers

Leading advertising technology companies are turning to Internap’s bare-metal servers to meet the real-time performance and big data analytics requirements of ad platforms and exchanges. Companies like AudienceScience, eXelate, Taptica, and many others – which process more than one trillion ad requests each month and monitor user activity across hundreds of billions of app sessions, videos and websites every day – have selected Internap for their high-performance applications, resulting in a 55 percent increase in the number of ad tech customers using Internap’s infrastructure services since 2011.

The digital advertising industry is growing rapidly as consumers spend more time online via mobile and social channels. Media research firm Magna Global expects mobile ad spend to increase at 35 percent year-over-year through 2018. As ad tech companies increasingly utilise real-time big data analytics for better targeting and performance, many of these companies find that commodity cloud public platforms do not deliver the level of performance required to seamlessly process massive amounts of ad requests and customer data in real time. Instead, many ad tech companies are moving their analytics-intensive workloads to Internap’s bare-metal servers, which deliver performance consistency and cost-efficiency at scale and can be consumed on a monthly or hourly basis via API or self-service customer portal.
“As companies increasingly turn to online channels when allocating their marketing budgets, digital advertising platforms can easily become overwhelmed with analysing and processing petabytes of data and experience unacceptable lags when faced with a deluge of requests,” said Christian Primeau, senior vice president and general manager of cloud and hosting at Internap. “Today’s ad tech companies require Internet infrastructure that is both sufficiently robust to meet stringent performance demands associated with these big data workloads and highly scalable to handle the explosion of digital advertising that’s expected in the coming years. Our bare-metal infrastructure can offer ad tech and big data workloads orders of magnitude better performance and cost-efficiency at scale than commodity public clouds.”

Internap also uniquely allows ad tech customers to meet their full range of workload requirements by hybridising bare-metal with other infrastructure, including public cloud, managed hosting and high-density colocation that can support up to 18kW per rack for high-end servers and specialised infrastructure.

Taptica helps marketers engage with mobile users via Internap’s hybrid bare-metal and public cloud
Taptica – a leading mobile user engagement platform that serves 150 advertisers like Zynga, EA, OpenTable, Expedia and Disney and handles more than 400 billion real-time mobile ad requests per month – joins the growing number of ad tech companies relying on Internap’s hybrid and bare-metal infrastructure. The company’s platform helps brands and app developers to engage valuable mobile users through mobile targeting, single point of access to real-time bidding exchanges and mobile ads and video campaigns.

As a result of exponential customer growth and ad request volume since its founding in 2012, Taptica sought an infrastructure solution that could more effectively meet the current performance demands placed on its platform and seamlessly scale to address future growth. Taptica chose to transition the majority of its customer-facing workloads from a large commodity cloud provider to Internap’s globally distributed, bare-metal infrastructure. Taptica is also using Internap’s OpenStack-based public cloud (next-generation AgileCLOUD) for less performance-intensive workloads associated with product and network testing, replication and temporary services. Additionally, Internap’s global Performance IP™ service with patented Managed Internet Route Optimizer™ (MIRO) technology ensures that Taptica’s customer traffic is delivered over the fastest Internet path, resulting in a reliable, seamless experience for advertisers, regardless of geographic location.

“In the last two years, our customer base and the amount of requests coming through our platform have grown dramatically,” said Tomer Weizman, chief technology officer of Taptica. “We needed to find a new Internet infrastructure partner that offered optimal performance and cost-effective scalability. Internap was the obvious choice, based on its unique ability to create a global, customised hybrid infrastructure environment that included bare-metal and virtual cloud servers and matched our uncompromising performance demands, including the flawless processing of hundreds of billions of advertising requests each month.”