Situation
In the world of business-to-business sales and marketing, high-quality lead generation is the highest priority for the Marketing Advocate team. The majority of new leads come from website visitors since that is usually the first place a prospect goes when gathering information. The better a website can engage a prospect and guide them through the sales cycle, the more success a company will have with generating new customers.
Over the last six years, Marketing Advocate, an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) in the Microsoft partner program, has built a successful company providing a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution focused on generating and qualifying web-based leads for business-to-business customers. Marketing Advocate provides two fundamental solutions:
Web Relationship Management System- Targeted at enterprise customers, this solution captures, measures and responds to individual browsing behavior on a company’s website. The solution automatically recommends content based on visitors’ actions, scores the visitor based on level of interest in the company’s products/services, and automatically follows up via email to further engage the visitor. Qualified leads are automatically passed to the customer’s SFA/CRM application by various integration methods.
Partner/Reseller Marketing System- Targeted at companies that drive sales through channel partners, this solution provides a ready-built co-branded marketing system to support partner sales and marketing efforts. The system aligns content (web copy, offers, whitepapers, webinars, etc) with business needs and reasons to buy, and allows partners to incorporate the content into their own website. Sponsor companies can allow partners to run fully automated email and nurture campaigns, and manage their leads from the system.
The power behind Marketing Advocate’s solutions is the ability to tag web-based content (such as webinars, datasheets, whitepapers, case studies, demos, etc) to the stages of the sales cycle. Website visitors are tracked and scored based on their interaction with specific content. The more a user interacts with high-interest content, the higher the score that prospect receives. If a prospect’s score reaches a predetermined threshold that lead is flagged for the sales team. With the Marketing Advocate system, all of this happens automatically.
SaaS Approach Delivers Customer Value
Since inception, Marketing Advocate solutions have always been delivered web-based, as the company determined that a SaaS approach would optimize their solution capabilities and future growth plans. In addition, the SaaS approach provides a number of superior benefits for customers, including:
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Removes IT resource issues for the customer; no added burden or costs for the team
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Easily integrates with customer websites
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Fast, low cost deployments
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Rapid new feature deployments so customers are always up to date
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Accessible from any computer via a browser
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Predictable monthly operating expense and no capital cost outlays required
For the first two years, Marketing Advocate outsourced the hosting of the application and the infrastructure to a smaller hosting provider. In 2006, as the company looked to the future, they realized their product and growth plans required a stronger partnership with an enterprise-class hosting provider.
Solution
Based on the strong recommendations from a few of their technology partners, Marketing Advocate chose OpSource as their new strategic hosting partner. “We really needed a forward-looking plan and major upgrade to our hosted infrastructure to support future growth plans. Hands down OpSource was the most capable partner we could have chosen to build a true enterprise-class infrastructure for our solution,” stated Michael Guerrieri, CTO for Marketing Advocate. The OpSource team is comprised of experts at delivering enterprise-class hosted environments for companies of all sizes. As a member of the Microsoft ISV Incubation Program, OpSource provides a proven-process for SaaS success that is specifically tailored for Microsoft ISV partners.
Upon selection by Marketing Advocate, the OpSource team quickly put together a plan of action. OpSource wanted to address both short and long-term issues for Marketing Advocate, including:
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Putting a strategic roadmap plan in place
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Creating an infrastructure architecture to address database, storage, and performance needs
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Ensuring infrastructure scalability
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Providing high availability of the environment
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Enhancing the infrastructure security
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OpSource has really risen to the challenge. We needed a company that would act as part of our team and this has happened in more ways than we could have imagined. |
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Michael Guerrieri CTO
Marketing Advocate
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To get started, the OpSource team met with Marketing Advocate for an in-depth discussion on the current application infrastructure, the issues the company has been experiencing, and future plans for the company’s solution and growth. One of the biggest concerns for Marketing Advocate was in the performance of its database and storage approach. Marketing Advocate solutions track, store, and react to every single individual visitor’s click on a client’s website. This generates a massive amount of data that must be processed and stored in real-time. The smooth performance of these functions is critical as the solution cannot impact a client’s website performance in any way or it could hinder the long-term success of Marketing Advocate. Marketing Advocate also expected to bring on a number of new clients that would double or triple the needs of the infrastructure within six months, and possibly increase the needs up to ten-fold within a year’s time. Getting the new infrastructure in place was a high priority.
The OpSource team put together a multi-pronged solution to address all of Marketing Advocate’s issues. First, OpSource moved Marking Advocate onto OpSource On-Demand, the company’s turnkey complex managed hosting solution. OpSource On-Demand goes far beyond traditional managed hosting, to include application and data operations and business services. In addition to taking full operational responsibility for Marketing Advocate’s solution, OpSource provided the following services and solutions:
Upgraded the Infrastructure- OpSource added a number of new servers, and upgraded to Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Editions
Clustered and Partitioned the Database- To improve performance, OpSource re-architected the database by clustering and partitioning across multiple servers. This improved the scalability and performance by removing input/output (I/O) bottlenecks.
Updated Storage Approach- OpSource involved one of their on-staff storage experts to come up with the optimal approach. Based on Marketing Advocates’s storage and performance needs, OpSource built a direct-attached storage system (DAS) rather than a traditional storage-area network (SAN). A DAS approach directly links the storage to each server and removes the I/O bottlenecks that sometimes occur in a SAN approach.
Moved Infrastructure to New Datacenter- Finally, the OpSource team assisted Marketing Advocate in a move to a new datacenter in San Jose that would ensure the highest availability and security possible.
The net effect of all of the upgrades and changes OpSource put in place was that, for the first time ever, Marketing Advocate now had an enterprise-class infrastructure that provided them with a solid foundation for growth.
Benefits
Over the last four years, Marketing Advocate’s partnership with OpSource has yielded a wide array of benefits to the company. OpSource has provided broad expertise and strategic resources to support Marketing Advocate’s immediate and longer term plans.
Enhanced Infrastructure
The most immediate benefits centered on the enhanced infrastructure the OpSource team put in place. Specific benefits include:
Enhanced Security- Because OpSource On-Demand infrastructure is SAS70 Type II audited (Statement on Accounting Standards No. 70 which indicates the hosting environment has passed an annual audit of the security standards in place) Marketing Advocate’s application is automatically covered. This is a critical requirement for Marketing Advocate’s customers to ensure the highest level of security is in place.
Higher Availability- OpSource provides Marketing Advocate with a 100% uptime service level so clients are assured the solution is always available.
Better Performance- The enhanced infrastructure performs at an estimated 25% improvement over the previous configuration.
High Scalability- Most importantly, Marketing Advocate can bring on very large new customers with the confidence that their solution will continue to perform at the highest standards.
“We needed a hosting partner that took a strategic approach and would be able to build an infrastructure that was scalable so we could grow with it, and take the burden off of Marketing Advocate so we can focus on building great software,” says Guerrieri.
Innovative Resources Available as Needed
In addition to the immediate tangible benefits realized with the new infrastructure, the strategic partnership with OpSource has brought broader benefits. The sheer scale of OpSource in terms of customers and employees provides opportunities for the company to add greater client value. OpSource can provide experts with deep knowledge of very specific issues Marketing Advocate might be wrestling with, as was the case with its issues with storage. OpSource was able to bring in a storage expert to come up with the best solution to the problem. The two companies are also discussing ways to enhance their partnership, such as OpSource serving as an additional channel for Marketing Advocate’s solution.
OpSource has also recently launched OpSource Cloud, the first cloud computing solution to bring together the flexibility, availability and community of the public cloud with the security, performance and control the enterprise demands. Marketing Advocate plans to consider taking advantage of the flexibility that OpSource Cloud provides to meet their growing Web and application server needs.
“OpSource has really risen to the challenge. We needed a company that would act as part of our team and this has happened in more ways than we could have imagined,” says Guerrieri.
About the Microsoft ISV Incubation Program
The Microsoft Incubation Center Program is designed to ease the commercial, financial, and technical challenges ISVs encounter while adding a service-based delivery application to their business offerings. Microsoft has established global facilities with a set of Gold Certified Partners in Hosting to guide ISVs through a structured series of business and architectural consulting sessions to ensure their business model and applications are ready for service-based delivery. For more information visit: www.microsoft.com/hosting/programs/incubationcenter.mspx.
Software + Services
Software-plus-services is an industry shift driven by the fast-growing recognition that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities. Microsoft is dedicated to helping individuals and businesses take advantage of these opportunities. By bringing together the best of both software and services, we maximize capabilities, choice, and flexibility for our customers. The broad software-plus-services approach unites multiple industry phenomena including software as a service, service-oriented development, and the Web 2.0 user experience under a common umbrella.
For more information about software-plus-services, go to: www.microsoft.com/softwareplusservices/.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com.
For more information about OpSource products and services, call (800) 664-9973, email info@opsource.net, or visit: http://www.opsource.net.
For more information about Marketing Advocate products and services, call (508) 775-9064, or visit: www.marketingadvocate.com.
