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AKQA on Joyent Customer Story

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About AKQA <ul><li>AKQA is an ideas-led agency, creating 360 degree marketing campaigns for many of the world’s leading brands. </li></ul><ul><li>Many of its social media campaigns go viral, receiving hundreds of thousands of visitors within the first hours after launch. </li></ul><ul><li>AKQA is best known for creating award-winning digital-centric campaigns for brands such as Coke, Nike, and Visa. The agency’s core ideas create deeper engagement between customers and brands. </li></ul><ul><li>AKQA packages its creative ideas in engaging ways and deploys on a social infrastructure that allows them to spread these ideas and actions virally. </li></ul>

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AKQA IT Challenge <ul><li>With any digital campaign, there is considerable uncertainty in regard to supporting infrastructure because it is difficult to predict how far and fast a viral campaign will spread. Success depends on the quality of the ideas and how motivated consumers are to engage with the message that’s delivered. </li></ul><ul><li>AKQA’s core challenges were: </li></ul><ul><ul><li>Freedom to Innovate and Launch New Campaigns : The creative and operations teams do not want to be constrained by technical issues as they create new, innovative social campaigns on behalf of their clients. </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Scalability : The ops team encourages the creative team to push their ideas further and bigger rather than feel constrained by what is technically possible. Yet, they don’t want to over-buy physical resources to ensure infrastructure headroom. When a campaign is underway, and traffic is being monitored and data analyzed, AKQA needs the ability to scale both horizontally by adding individual compute nodes, as well as vertically to handle peaks in traffic. </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Technical Support . The ops team also needs a partner willing to quickly answer questions that may come up involving any production systems and to help resolve any potential issues. </li></ul></ul>

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AKQA IT Runs on Joyent <ul><li>Joyent’s Solution Provided the Following Core Benefits: </li></ul><ul><ul><li>Freedom to Innovate : Given the Joyent cloud, the ops team can now fully support the creative process, and not construct obstacles for fear of not having enough infrastructure capacity to handle potential workload or having to over-buy capital to insure enough capacity. </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Success at Scale : In one case, the AKQA team estimated that 100,000 users would use a Facebook application during the first two months of a campaign. In reality,100,000 users visited the app within the first hour of launch, and Joyent’s infrastructure handled the workload flawlessly. </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Rapid Set-up of New Environments : When AKQA’s operations team starts a new project, they have to set up new development and staging environments. With Joyent, the team can clone the infrastructure and reduce their setup time from a couple weeks to a couple of day. </li></ul></ul><ul><ul><li>Support : AKQA and Joyent have worked face-to-face to review the agency’s reference architecture to provide feedback for improvements. In addition, AKQA has established personal relationships with the Joyent support team. </li></ul></ul>