AdDaptive Intelligence:
No cloud? No problem!

AdDaptive Intelligence is a B2B advertising agency that combines offline business data with proprietary targeting to help their clients reach the ideal audiences. Setfive and AdDaptive have been long term partners through one re-brand and several changes in their business.

As AdDaptive moved deeper into programmatic buying, they hit a unique technical requirement. Because of the response time requirements of the advertising exchange, AdDaptive would need to place physical servers within the same data center as the advertising exchange.

• AdDaptive and Setfive are both "cloud native" companies, so neither team had meaningful experience provisioning, setting up, and running servers in a traditional data center environment.
• Because of the projected size of the deployment, AdDaptive was stuck in a middle ground where they were too big for a managed service offering like Rackspace to be cost effective but too small for a direct relationship with a data center.
• AdDaptive anticipated that this integration would become a core business offering, so retaining as much control over the infrastructure as possible was important.

As a group we evaluated several options, including partnering with a vendor who already had servers in the correct data center. We also discussed the project with a few of our peers who, like us, had mostly cloud experience but had used that to successfully setup servers in a traditional data center.

Ultimately, we decided that the best approach was for AdDaptive to purchase their own hardware, rent space as well as network transit, and Setfive would setup and manage the servers.

• By purchasing and running our own hardware we were able to setup a cost effective solution and AdDaptive established a direct relationship with the data center. This allows them to be confident that they'll be able to restore services in case something goes wrong.
• The Setfive team gained valuable experience around setting up data center servers which was valuable when AdDaptive had to complete a similar project in a different data center.
• Because AdDaptive owned the servers they were able to upgrade the RAM and hard disks on the servers as the scope of the integration grew.

Our first foray into running servers in data centers was a success. As of writing, we run two data centers with AdDaptive with additional integrations on the roadmap.