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.
Global Red’s marketing campaigns encompass web, electronic direct
mail, SMS, call centre, point-of-sale and customer loyalty programs.
These campaigns generate average customer traffic volumes in the
millions per month for Global Red clients.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.
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