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AdPrecision

Overview

Adprecision, founded in 2005, is a search and contextual technology company that provides services for clients in the advertising and online publishing industries. Based in Manchester, the company has around 20 employees, and specialises in enabling newspaper publishers to compete with internet search giants like Google and Yahoo for online advertising spend.

Business need:
To deliver its contextual advertising and search optimisation services, Adprecision needed a platform capable of handling thousands of concurrent user sessions and large volumes of transactions.

Solution:
Working with APT Solutions, a U2 Business Partner and U2 Distributor in the UK, Adprecision built its services around the UniData 7.1 database platform, running under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. An extended relational database, UniData is designed to handle highly complex datasets with relatively few tables and indexes, leading to a high level of transactional performance.

Benefits:
The speed of the UniData platform helps Adprecision deliver results in milliseconds – vital for smooth Web browsing – and requires relatively little hardware, helping to keep IT costs low. UniData is embedded in the Adprecision applications, providing highly reliable service with no need for a dedicated database administrator. UniData provides a versatile development environment, helping Adprecision to respond quickly to changing needs and compete effectively with much larger companies.

Case Study: AdPrecision builds a high-performance search marketing platform with UniData

Adprecision, founded in 2005, is a search and contextual technology company that provides services for clients in the advertising and online publishing industries. Based in Manchester, the company has around 20 employees, and specialises in enabling newspaper publishers to compete with internet search giants like Google and Yahoo for online advertising spend.

“In the case of contextual advertising for newspaper Web sites and other online publications, it is fairly easy to plug in Google advertising,” explains CEO Justin Morshead. “But that kills off the direct relationship between the publication and its advertisers. With our Adtarget service, the publisher can decide which advertisers to work with and build a closer and more profitable relationship, while still delivering effective, highly targeted advertising content to its readers.

“The benefits are clear, which is why publishers like Times Online, the Telegraph, Express Newspapers and IPC Media choose to work with us.”

Adtarget captures feeds from around 450 advertisers, normalises the data and formats it to the publisher’s specifications, and uses a powerful contextual engine to match the adverts to readers’ searches. Whether the reader is looking for property news, accounts of travel in the Mediterranean, or a review of a new car, the articles will be accompanied by relevant offers from the publisher’s preferred advertisers.

Besides Adtarget, the company also provides two other main services. Adwire helps advertisers manage pay-per-click campaigns on Google and other search engines, while Adfly helps optimise Web sites to move them nearer to the top of lists of search results. All three products are built on the same code-base.

The need for performance

Adtarget and Adwire both need to be able to deliver results within milliseconds, in order to maintain a smooth browsing experience for consumers: if a Web page takes too long to load, users will look elsewhere. When Adprecision was designing the technology platform to support its services, performance was a top priority.

“We needed a database that could handle intricate datasets, process numerous complex transactions per second and support thousands of concurrent user sessions,” explains Justin Morshead. “A traditional relational database would have needed hundreds of tables and indexes to store the data – requiring investment in expensive top-end hardware to achieve the necessary performance. We decided to take a different approach.”

Members of Adprecision’s IT team had previously worked with UniData, an extended relational database capable of operating multidimensionally. Instead of using large numbers of flat tables and indexes, UniData supports nested tables and multivalued fields, and is designed to store all related data in a single physical record. This has significant advantages in terms of performance and scalability, and because the overall structure of the database is simpler, it does not need to be constantly monitored and optimised by a dedicated database administrator.

Calling on the experts

Adprecision asked APT Solutions, a U2 Business Partner and the Master Distributor for UniData software in the UK, to help with the development and tuning of a platform based around UniData technologies.

“The APT Solutions team includes some of the UK’s leading UniData specialists,” says Justin Morshead. “Our in-house team is very experienced too, but it was a real advantage to be able to call on APT’s expert advice to help us get the most out of the platform.”

With APT’s help, Adprecision was able to develop and deploy a solution that met all its clients’ requirements for performance and stability.

Low-cost infrastructure

Adprecision runs its applications and embedded UniData databases under Linux, on commodity Intel-based hardware – keeping IT costs low.

“A few years ago, if you wanted to process the kind of transaction volumes that we experience, you would have needed to buy a mainframe or a very large server farm,” comments Justin Morshead. “Running UniData on Linux is such an efficient combination that even low-cost hardware can deliver the millisecond response times we need.”

Keeping ahead of the competition

Another advantage of the UniData platform is its flexibility. Due to its multidimensional capabilities, if a new kind of advertising feed needs to be added to the system, there is no need to restructure and reoptimise the whole database. In addition, UniData has its own development environment that makes it simple to build new functionalities into Adprecision’s applications.

“Since we are competing with companies like Google, which have enormous development resources at their disposal, it is crucial for us to be able to respond quickly to our customers’ changing needs,” says Justin Morshead. “We estimate that UniData enables us to bring new services to market two or three times faster than would be possible with a different database, so it gives us a major competitive advantage.”

He concludes: “Partnering with the U2 team and APT solutions has enabled us to build a high-performance, low-maintenance platform that provides excellent service at a minimal cost. The stability, scalability and flexibility of the UniData platform make it an ideal basis for our innovative services.”

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Customer quotes

"We needed a database that could handle intricate datasets, process numerous complex transactions per second and support thousands of concurrent user sessions. A traditional relational database would have needed hundreds of tables and indexes to store the data – requiring investment in expensive top-end hardware to achieve the necessary performance. Since we are competing with companies like Google, which have enormous development resources at their disposal, it is crucial for us to be able to respond quickly to our customers' changing needs. We estimate that UniData enables us to bring new services to market two or three times faster than would be possible with a different database, so it gives us a major competitive advantage."

Justin Morshead, AdPrecision

"It not only works perfectly, but the system went from concept to live in less than a month. The speed was really impressive, but what is equally impressive is how well it works. We have had no problems at all, and from day one it functioned as we had planned."

Roger Walther, Alpmobil

"The UniVerse database gives us the ability to build new applications that can easily be deployed quickly and efficiently."

Doug Leupen, President & CEO, Entrinsik

"The business requirements at Danny's Automotive involved a high volume of data transaction processing coupled with a quick turnaround time on management reports. The dynamics of the Techfinity Software and Rocket U2 database software allowed us to achieve and maintain that correct balance, with the robustness of the U2 database ensuring a 99% uptime, another critical requirement."

Renier Smit, Financial Manager, Danny's Automotive

"What we are doing is truly unique in the financial world. We are so singular in our structure that our costs are almost incomprehensible to the industry. Our key differentiator is that we can execute all of our work much faster and much cheaper than any of our competitors, which would not be possible without UniVerse as the backbone of all of our integrated operations."

Robert Goldberg, President & CEO, e3m Investments

We needed a database solution that was robust enough to meet the corporate initiative for data security, and UniVerse offered the functionality we needed."

Dennis Smith, Financial & Administrative Controller, Johnson Matthey

"We've built our solutions on UniVerse from the very beginning, and we've never regretted that early decision. Rocket's powerful database delivers the speed, flexibility, and range of capabilities we needed to deliver a solution that handles documents, files, and video and audio records in one efficient, cost-effective package. A traditional relational database could never have handled these diverse types of media as quickly and inexpensively as UniVerse can."

Dave DeYoung, 1mage

"We needed a database that was ODBC compliant and that is where UniVerse came into the picture… Being able to store multiple pieces of information in one field is very efficient. People are amazed at the speed and responsiveness of a MultiValue database."

Matt Anfrejco, Owner, Polaris Information Systems

"One of the key reasons is that the Rocket U2 database is the fastest database in the police world. We can look at 100,000 records in a few seconds – in contrast, SQL takes a lot longer. Using SQL would cripple our investigations because it's so slow. That's one of the major reasons we use Hitech Systems. It's also incredibly easy to transfer data, so our systems are able to communicate seamlessly with each other."

Detective Lieutenant Wayne Hoss, San Mateo Police Department

"VISION is built on the Rocket UniVerse – a multidimensional database platform. Compared to a traditional relational database, UniVerse needs fewer tables, which makes it less complex to manage. In fact, UniVerse can provide excellent performance on relatively inexpensive hardware, without the need for extensive optimisation. Our customers can more or less leave the database to run itself, enabling them to focus on higher-value tasks.

Mark Kinnell, Managing Director, Selima Software

UniData is designed to offer very high levels of performance, even on comparatively low-end hardware – which makes it ideal for not-for-profit organisations operating with a tight IT budget". "In addition, UniData is designed to be embedded into applications such as Stratum, reducing the need for database administration and making life easier for non-technical users. The platform is so stable and reliable that the Society of Authors does not need to employ its own IT staff."

Nick Osborn, APT Solutions account manager

"We've also been able to build new features and functions over the years without having to tear down and rebuild our technology infrastructure. As an example, we integrate with PDA-based platforms so our chauffeurs can have the most accurate, up-to-date information such as a flight delay or cancellation. We also use Satnav data to provide the best possible service."

Darren Allsop, CIO, Tristar Worldwide Chauffeur Services

"Our UniData MultiValue database has been a game-changer for us. We have been using UniData for many years and have always been able to use it to rapidly implement complex business rules against large databases. Our competition, even with much larger IT budgets, struggle to roll out systems that are as functionally rich as ours is."

Ron McKinney, VP or Information Systems, Land Title

"Healthcare supply distributors play a critical role in the industry and are not immune to the challenges of reducing the dost of care for patients. With Rocket U2 technology and support, we've been able to deliver MDS as an affordable service, helping distributors to better manage their costs, become more efficient, and meet the level of service their customers demand."

Dave Fertig, VP of Technical Services, They Systems House, Inc.

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