Rackspace Technology

Condé Nast Digital Germany was facing high costs and lack of control over its IT operations. The infrastructure that stored and served magazine content was hosted by a traditional website hosting company. An agency handled website development and managed content. The company was reliant on advertising revenue and needed to keep its costs low while delivering an engaging experience to site visitors. The problem became clear when the German edition of Vogue published an interview with a top star. The company had a huge surge in traffic for a few days, and the hosting provider couldn’t add capacity quickly enough. The leased servers added were expensive too. The company had to pay a one-month minimum fee for a server it needed for just a few days.

Intersect Digital, a digital marketing agency, was facing a challenge with its existing dedicated server hosting for client projects. The hosting was not only expensive, but it also presented a problem when traffic spiked or a campaign ended its cycle and competed with compute resources for testing & development. With a roster of several Fortune 500 clients, Intersect needed a flexible solution that would be affordable, yet scale easily to meet demand when traffic spiked. The integrity of the data collected was also of utmost importance to their clients—keeping the database on two replicated dedicated database servers with an additional backup service was required.

Artizone, an online storefront for specialty foods, was looking for a way to scale its eCommerce platform without worrying about infrastructure limitations. The company wanted to focus on enhancing its service and growing its customer base, but was hindered by the need for a robust, flexible, and secure infrastructure that could handle the demands of eCommerce. The company initially ran a pilot offering on a dedicated server hosted by GoGrid, but after the successful pilot, Artizone decided to move to a cloud-based solution instead of dedicated hardware. The company wanted to be able to add and subtract servers quickly to accommodate occasional peaks in demand, without tying up budget in capacity that would rarely be used.

Excite Digital Media, a search engine marketing (SEM) services provider based in Sydney, Australia, was experiencing rapid growth and needed a reliable, flexible, high-performance infrastructure to support its operations. The company had tried several infrastructure strategies, including housing some of its infrastructure at its own offices, using a co-location facility, and even turning to an infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) provider. However, as the company grew, its ad hoc approach had several drawbacks. Managing an ad hoc infrastructure was inefficient and keeping up with hardware purchases using a piecemeal approach was challenging. The company was also wary of getting locked into a proprietary cloud environment and wanted to limit the amount of capital devoted to hardware.

Wild Bamboo Rocket, a small consulting company, identified that cloud computing was fundamentally changing the business and technology model for startups. The traditional model of launching a startup involved hiring in-house system administrators, buying and setting up the hardware, and then starting the development work. This model was suitable for larger startups with substantial funding and in-house expertise. However, the challenge today is to deliver a comparable level of service but at a lower cost and with faster results. Wild Bamboo Rocket needed to quickly address clients’ needs to win new business and then quickly assemble the right team and deliver results. They believed that cloud computing could make this possible.

OnCampus Advertising, a media agency focusing on the college student market, was facing challenges with its existing IT infrastructure. As the company's customer base grew, so did the desire to increase the depth and breadth of its services. However, its infrastructure wasn't allowing it to drive business forward and implementing its unique software-as-a-service (SaaS) application was in peril. The company needed an IT infrastructure that would help it continue down the path of growth, but it wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. The company had a roadmap for growth, but didn’t have the infrastructure to support the growth.

Harmonix Music Systems, a videogame development company specializing in music-based games, faced a significant challenge when planning for the release of Rock Band 3. The company had learned from previous releases that significant spikes in network traffic occurred with each new release, and traffic further increased during the holiday season. Harmonix needed a load testing solution that was able to simulate not only the expected load of a new release, but also an influx of heavy usage during a holiday season. For Rock Band and Rock Band 2, they performed load testing on their servers using an in-house solution. However, this configuration created security concerns and resource issues. They could not launch as many instances as they wanted to in order to scale the load testing. These issues combined with the desire to save money on load testing led Harmonix to look at cloud computing options for load testing when launching Rock Band 3.