Case Study

CASE STUDY

MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

MicroAd powers its next-generation marketing platform with Lenovo servers Overview MicroAd selected high-performance, high-availability Lenovo System x3650 M5 servers to support its innovative UNIVERSE marketing platform. By delivering unprecedented insights into consumer behavior, MicroAd UNIVERSE enables clients to shape more targeted ad campaigns— boosting conversion rates and revenues.

Founded in 2007, MicroAd is a leader in the digital advertising space, offering comprehensive ad network and ad platform services that facilitate ad trafficking and connect clients to potential customers. Headquartered in Tokyo, MicroAd manages one of Japan’s largest ad networks with a reach of approximately 65 million unique users a month. In recent years, the company has expanded operations across Southeast Asia. The company offers a range of popular advertising applications and platforms, including MicroAd BLADE, MicroAd PIXEL and MicroAd COMPASS, to help its clients get the best results from their ad campaigns. MicroAd’s mission is to enable all businesses – from large-scale enterprises to corner shops – to reap the rewards of effective advertising. In particular, the company wants to provide services that enable its clients to navigate today’s increasingly dynamic web advertising world.

“Not only did the Lenovo solution meet our expectations in terms of performance, we also found it to be very user-friendly.” —Naoya Ito, System Developer, MicroAd

CASE STUDY


Giving clients more In December 2016, the company launched MicroAd UNIVERSE – a complete

Solution components

marketing infrastructure service that collects and integrates data from multiple

Hardware

sources to create individual consumer profiles. MicroAd UNIVERSE then analyzes

Lenovo System x3650 M5 with

this data, using Apache Hadoop technology, to deepen clients’ understanding of their audience, enabling them to tailor ad campaigns and increase engagement. With MicroAd UNIVERSE, companies can integrate data from multiple business systems and assign each customer with a unique user ID. This information is then integrated with MicroAd’s repository of consumer web browsing behavior data from 400 million browsers. Masaaki Motoi, Senior Manager of the System Development Department at MicroAd, says: “Until now, we’ve only been able to analyze consumer data from a single source – their web browsing history. With MicroAd UNIVERSE, we can analyze data from multiple sources, giving us a much more accurate consumer profile.”

Putting solid foundations in place Crucial to the development of MicroAd UNIVERSE was a rock-solid underlying IT infrastructure. Masaaki Motoi comments: “We decided to implement Lenovo servers to run some of our Apache Hadoop systems, which we use to analyze consumer data. In particular, we wanted to migrate the key-value stores to Lenovo System x servers as they require high-speed performance levels.” After working with the Lenovo team to run a comprehensive proof of concept (PoC), the company decided to implement six Lenovo System x3650 M5 servers. Powered by the Intel® Xeon® E5 processor family, the Lenovo servers offer the high levels of performance needed to analyze ever-increasing volumes of consumer data. Naoya Ito, System Developer at MicroAd, remarks: “During the PoC, we measured how long it took to process 1 TB of data on the new Lenovo System x3650 M5 servers. Not only did the Lenovo solution meet our expectations in terms of performance, we also found it to be very user-friendly.” Masaaki Motoi adds: “We’ve been using Lenovo servers for many years, so we know from experience just how good the cost-performance ratio is.”

Intel® Xeon® E5 processor family Software Apache Hadoop MapR Services Lenovo Warranty & Maintenance Services

CASE STUDY


Looking to the future Today, MicroAd runs the majority of its mission-critical Hadoop systems, which power the company’s core UNIVERSE platform, on the Lenovo solution – and is highly satisfied with the performance and availability it provides. Masaaki Motoi says: “We’re currently looking to move the remaining Hadoop systems over to the Lenovo environment. Not only will this boost performance of the MicroAd UNIVERSE platform even further, decommissioning our existing dedicated Hadoop clusters will dramatically reduce operating costs.” Naoya Ito concludes: “We worked very well with the Lenovo team during the PoC and they continue to offer fantastic support. The Lenovo solution helps ensure that our client services run smoothly, and we’re very much looking forward to continuing our partnership with Lenovo in the years to come.”

For more information

“We’ve been using Lenovo servers for many years, so we know from experience just how good the cost-performance ratio is.” —Masaaki Motoi, Senior Manager of the System Development Department, MicroAd

To learn more about Lenovo Data Center Systems solutions, contact your Lenovo Sales Representative or Lenovo Business Partner, or visit: lenovo.com/systems For more information about MicroAd, visit: www.microad.co.jp/en/

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