Industry: Media, Interactive Television
Annual Revenue: not disclosed
Number of Employees: 42
Rackspace Hosting Solution: Managed
With the growing demand of Video On Demand (VOD) advertising, Liquidus needed more reliability and scalability than colocation could offer, as well as a fully managed email solution. Our quick and easy scaling abilities for managed configurations and the full capabilities and support of Managed Microsoft Exchange by Rackspace allowed them to offload many of their IT burdens without second-guessing their decision.
Synopsis
Liquidus On Demand Marketing, based in Chicago, provides advertisers with a powerful, cost effective means of advertising and selling products to cable television viewers through the interactive Video On Demand (VOD) platform found on digital cable. Today, through VOD advertising, advertisers can reach millions of self-selecting subscribers who are looking for products now in the comfort of their own homes.
Situation
In today's realm of digital cable, movies and television shows 'on demand video' is a huge selling point for potential customers. Advertisers are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to reach these potential customers. In the past, Liquidus had been leveraging online marketing to serve its customers' needs, but with the growing demand of the digital video market, they shifted focus to producing video on demand ads for digital cable television and its advertisers.
Working in partnership with major cable providers like Comcast, Liquidus produces digital video advertising content that goes on to a 'search on demand' offering. They focus on many areas of advertising including automotive, real estate and retail.
With Liquidus, consumers can access detailed, interactive video information that's more engaging than static text, on products they're interested in, with a simple click of their TV remote. So in order to provide this high-end service, Liquidus knew it needed a rock-solid and reliable infrastructure.
"We have a bank of servers at Rackspace responsible for receiving a vast amount of external content that goes into the final produced movies, such as images and XML data, which then gets turned into broadcast-ready video," says Allen Racho, application engineer, Liquidus On Demand Marketing. "Everything hinges on our Rackspace servers. All of the information advertisers send gets aggregated through our servers at Rackspace. Our in-house platform then connects to the Rackspace servers and retrieves the verified info so the movie-generation process can begin."
Liquidus has four primary web servers, two database servers, a dedicated voice-over server, a dedicated data import server, a staging server, a firewall, and managed backup hosted in Rackspace's Dallas data center. But equally important is the full-featured Managed Exchange solution that Rackspace hosts for Liquidus.
"Because email is such a vital communication tool between us, our customers and the cable providers, we needed a reliable hosting provider that also specializes in managed mail to ensure our employees' mailboxes are accessible and useable 24/7," says Racho. "Our IT and development resources are focused on helping us to create industry-leading, on-demand video advertising. Managing or troubleshooting our infrastructure and email would take them away from this revenue-generating business."
Solution
Liquidus previously hosted its infrastructure and email solution with a Chicago-based colocation facility. But with their growing success, Liquidus ran into problems that most successful colocation customers have: Capacity.
"We quickly outgrew our infrastructure," says Racho. "We actually had a few managed services with the previous provider, including email, and in the final few months we began experiencing increasing unreliability. We had constant problems with the in-house created email solution provided."
So when Liquidus began shopping around for a new hosting provider, Managed Microsoft Exchange from Rackspace was a large selling point for choosing the company.
"We had been leaning toward Exchange for sometime," recalls Racho. "We feel Exchange is the gold standard. In our business, we need use of all the Outlook features, especially in regards to calendar features, like the ability to schedule meetings and integrate with Outlook."
By ultimately choosing Managed Microsoft Exchange from Rackspace, Liquidus is provided with a simple and scalable service in a highly available deployment of the world's most widely-deployed email and collaboration solution, Microsoft Exchange.
Benefits
Liquidus, in turn, is given enough control to manage their email configuration without requiring extensive knowledge of the solution, and Rackspace does everything else. From monitoring, filtering, patching, updating, troubleshooting and data backups, Managed Exchange is more than just a technology solution, it's a full-on support solution. Rackspace also includes premium spam filtering and virus protection, which is a must have for any business.
"The best thing about Managed Microsoft Exchange from Rackspace is that it is built on Rackspace's infrastructure," says Racho. "Their high availability configuration has been renowned for network uptime and by applying the same support services to Managed Exchange. It gives us a peace of mind knowing we don't have to worry about email downtime. We place a great premium on the reliability and availability of Rackspace's Exchange solution, that if it were to go down, we would feel it immediately."
But through Rackspace's Fanatical Support®, this isn't an issue.
Racho exclaims the experience has had no problems so far. He has been most impressed with the overall responsiveness of the support team every time a new ticket is created. He claims it is incomparably better than anything he's experienced in the past, and the overall response time, in addition to Rackspace's technical know-how, is above and beyond that of their previous provider.
"On a whole, the hosting experience has been first rate. Rackspace's level of expertise and experience when it comes to Managed Exchange is superb," says Racho. "It's a great value. What we pay for is what we get, and what we get is Fanatical Support. And not just for our hosting needs, but our email needs as well. Rackspace is proving they are more than just a web hosting provider. I just can't say enough about the value we get out of having such an excellent and responsive support team that is available 24x7x365."
