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With 40 offices across North America, Basis Technologies (formerly Centro) is a provider of enterprise-class software for digital advertising organizations.
The company’s technology platform, Basis, is the first of its kind SaaS advertising solution unifying programmatic and direct media buying, along with workflow automation, cross-channel campaign planning, universal reporting and business intelligence. Basis boosts media, team and business performance by enabling advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform.
With the rise of digital advertising, Riegsecker and his team saw Basis’s future in programmatic media buying. After raising $22.5 million in venture capital, Basis launched Centro Brand Exchange, an ad marketplace for unsold inventory. Subsequently, the company launched Basis, the company’s cloud-based software platform for media planning.
Basis later acquired SiteScout to add real-time bidding technology to the Basis platform, providing digital agencies with a one-stop-shop for digital advertising buying.
In the programmatic buying world, speed matters. Created to facilitate high-frequency trading, the Basis platform manages 160 billion bid requests a day from sellers who are auctioning available ad inventory online. It supports hundreds of digital advertising agencies who are seeking to secure that online “real estate” for their clients. Transactions happen in milliseconds and even a moment’s delay can represent an opportunity lost for the agency and their client.
To support this high-frequency trading business model, Basis needed a IT business partner it could rely on for state-of-the-art hardware and a lightning-fast network which was capable of handling massive workloads with near real-time communication between systems.
Aptum supported Basis to deliver a scalable, high-performance solution by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host Basis platform, supported by specialized hardware and network services tailored to Basis’s needs supplied through Aptum’s managed services line of business.
This included sourcing high-speed servers and storage configurations optimized for real-time bidding workloads to work alongside the AWS environment leveraging:
Aptum also provided pre-migration planning, hardware procurement, and post-implementation support, ensuring seamless integration and ongoing performance optimization.
“We have 100s of Linux boxes, and use open source for almost everything. And we also do big data for reporting back to our clients,” explains Fey. “We look to Aptum to supply us with different types of equipment. Sometimes we are looking for hardware that is as fast as possible. Sometimes storage is key. And sometimes it is a combination of the two. We also look to them as our network service provider. Our external network needs to support the 160 billion transactions a day our platform processes. Internally, it needs to be even faster, as the workload is even more intense. Our machines need to talk to each other, basically in real-time, to handle all those transactions flowing through our infrastructure. With programmatic buying now the norm in the industry, our platform, our infrastructure and our network put us on par with other modern digital media buying providers.”
Aptum supports Basis’s business operations out of three data center locations, two located on the East and West Coast of the US and one in Europe. This distributed model ensures that the company’s IT infrastructure and the network is situated close to its agency customers.
This hybrid solution positioned Basis as a competitive leader in digital media buying, ensuring its platform meets the demands of modern advertising agencies.
“We have a fantastic relationship with our Aptum account managers. We are very happy. They are really trying to be the very best partner. In the IT industry, you hear of companies that treat their customers poorly, but our relationship with Aptum is a very good one. It is a true partnership with give and take on both sides. They have taken the time to know our business, our preferences and what we are looking for. We just tell them that we need to buy a particular configuration, with such-and-such amount of memory and such-and-such drive, and they go source it and build it for us.
“One of our commercial off the shelf software solutions stores system in memory. It requires a specific configuration of the hard drive to perform. The vendor, who sold us the software, gave us a service level agreement (SLA) and within that SLA the physical drive should have been specified, but it wasn’t. This put us in a difficult situation because it turns out it was quite difficult to obtain that drive. The software would not run without it. Because of its extensive partnerships, Aptum’s managed services team was able to source the hardware we needed. The team really went out of its way to make sure we had what we needed on time.”
Aptum is a global provider of hybrid multi-cloud managed services that helps you own your destiny in the cloud. Through CloudOps software, consulting, and managed services, we help enterprises, software providers, and digital businesses choose, govern, and optimise the right infrastructure for every workload across hyperscale, regional, private, and edge environments. With expertise in migration, DevOps, and managed services on AWS, we help customers like Basis build and run secure, scalable, and high-performance architectures that support modern digital experiences.
