Global Red partners with Macquarie Hosting to reduce time to market for multichannel marketing campaigns

Virtualised hosting solution supports expansive growth of interactive marketing agency Global Red and its clients

Sydney, 30 September 2008 – Macquarie Hosting, a division of Macquarie Telecom, today announced it has signed a three year, $1 million deal with leading Australian behaviour based marketing agency Global Red for a fully-managed dedicated virtualised hosting solution.

Under the deal, Macquarie Hosting will host Global Red’s mission critical CRM, campaign management and analytical applications for key clients including NRMA, Priceline and Toyota.

The Macquarie Hosting solution will also underpin further planned expansion of the Global Red business which has already grown by 200 per cent in the last 12 months.

The NRMA ‘More4Members’ customer loyalty program currently has more than 2.2 million members and Global Red is prepared for anticipated growth of 300 per cent when State-based clubs come on board.

Priceline has more than 2 million members in its ClubCard program, which sends out targeted loyalty vouchers and monthly e-newsletters as well as exclusive offers and discounts.  With online volumes varying depending on the timing of marketing campaigns, Global Red needed to provide Priceline with a robust and scalable platform that could quickly increase systems infrastructure capacity to cope with peaks in traffic.

The high-availability, scalable and fully managed dedicated virtualised infrastructure from Macquarie Hosting will enable Global Red to rapidly and confidently deploy additional multichannel targeted marketing campaigns for new clients.

Following a competitive assessment of hosting providers, Global Red selected Macquarie Hosting for its proven experience with online and transaction based businesses. The ability to scale CPU memory and disk storage in low time were critical factors, as were guaranteed 24/7 low latency availability of mission critical applications and the provision of a dedicated team of technical experts to support local growth.

“It is critical for Global Red to be able to provide our clients with the fastest path to deliver market leading initiatives and targeted cut through campaigns. We also need to ensure that our customers have a smooth and reliable experience when they interact with the brand across all channels,” said Mark McCormick, Managing Director, Global Red.

“The Macquarie Hosting solution gives us access to best-of-breed infrastructure, which scales rapidly with our business without the need to invest in additional hardware.”

The VMWare ESX Server 3.5 managed hosting platform is specifically designed to help Global Red manage peaks in demand. Dedicated firewalls and an EMC Clarion SAN with secure meshed network offer added security.

The applications will be housed on Macquarie Hosting servers in its ISO and DSD Gateway certified data centre, the Intellicentre.

For Global Red’s clients especially in the banking arena, who manage credit card and other sensitive information from customers, security is paramount. Macquarie Hosting offers the highest levels of security to protect the transactions and privacy of end customers,” McCormick said.