As a digitally-based company, technology underpins all PointRoll’s customer services. Previously dependent upon a managed hosting environment for its network and datacenter provision, the existing solution could not grow with the company in terms of processing capability. Costs were high, uptime had been a problem and a three month window for changes meant that PointRoll could not respond quickly to increasing customer demands, which impacted sales revenues. A new approach was required.

 

PointRoll, moved their service in house and invested in a leading edge Cisco datacenter environment based on Nexus switching, Unified Computing System (UCS) and Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) technologies.

 

Ofer Bar-Zakai, IT Director at PointRoll explained what they were looking to achieve in both the business case for the datacenter solution and the return on this investment in deployment and adoption timescales to support the business transformation.

 

“The datacenter solution business case delivered increased processing capability of 25% p.a. and reduced operational expenses of 20%.  This meant we could invest in additional service innovations to build a flexible datacenter to meet growing customer demands”.

 

 

To meet aggressive timescales and ensure return of investment on the technology, deployment planning and implementation was critical. 

 

Ofer Bar-Zakai recognised, “With such new technology, my team had limited experience in deployment configuration or the ability to troubleshoot critical systems post launch and we had to guarantee zero downtime. The project was complex and I was concerned about the go live date.”  

PointRoll needed an experienced learning partner to assist with the design that would deliver real world knowledge transfer to their support team and Ofer approached Firefly.  “Their Mentored Services offered a unique approach which would leave us self-sufficient. Firefly guided our planning and design in the context of our business goals”. 

 

They set up a production environment by using PointRoll’s own equipment for the lab.  Firefly provided hands on education around deployment and migration. They supported the PointRoll team from the product being taken out of the box to successful implementation and left them with the skills to support the solution in-house on a long-term basis. 

 

 

PointRoll had the datacenter up and running by the target date, have a resilient design as well as a well-trained internal support team. This achieved their cost reduction goals and at the same time provided an infrastructure that can support the 25% year growth needed.

 

 “If we had not partnered with Firefly we simply would not have been able to meet the go live date. I suspect the process would have taken months longer”.

 

Firefly’s mentored services transferred knowledge & skills to give PointRoll the confidence to support and scale the solution in-house long term reducing on-going support costs by more than 20%. The datacenter infrastructure now scales for the next 5 years without need for any redesign.

 

Ofer summarises “Firefly excels both in their strategic approach to reaping the best value from leading edge technology and in their understanding of how it all works – it is impressive.”

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PointRoll is a leading digital marketing solutions & technology provider that enables advertisers, agencies and publishers to design and deliver interactive campaigns that power over half of all rich media online advertisements delivering 400 million impressions daily for more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 brands.