Scaling an AdTech Platformfor Massive Growth
The Challenge | Scaling a Cloud-Native Platform
Today, DigitalReef builds technology that delivers unique access to untapped audiences and intelligently engages users on mobile and connected TV (CTV) devices across the Americas. DigitalReef manages billions of potential impressions daily for CTV across the Americas. It is also the largest mobile marketing and advertising platform in Latin America, with a total network of 500M+ registered users, capturing 3.3 billion monthly impressions and reaching approximately 70% of mobile users in Latin America.
Back in 2016 when DigitalReef (then Imagination Unwired) approached CoStrategix with a small team and an initial Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the founders knew they didn’t have much time. “The window of opportunity to launch a new technology platform is short, and we knew we needed serious engineering skills to build out our platform on the Cloud,” said Renjith Ramachandran, Chief Technical Officer. “We were looking for a partner with deep technology experience to build the most robust and scalable technologies and deliver fast using agile practices.”
As the company has grown – both organically and through a series of acquisitions – today’s priority continues to be scaling the enterprise cloud-native platform for rapid growth while maintaining security and robustness.
Results
CoStrategix took a strategic planning approach, collaborating with DigitalReef at the executive level to plan for both the immediate needs as well as the long-term roadmap aligned with the founders’ vision. CoStrategix has been a partner every step of the way as the business has grown. Together, they have proactively increased the scalability, functionality, and robustness of the platform, while moving services progressively towards cloud-native solutions and managed services. This has reduced the cost and improved the operational efficiency of the platform.
What started out as a single-service mobile AdTech platform has morphed into a global media platform delivering localized, micro-personalized mobile experiences for consumers across mobile, connected TV, and digital streaming. Today, the DigitalReef platform empowers operators and OEMs, advertisers, and app developers with direct access to hundreds of millions of devices through a multitude of channels. Some key features of the Digital Reef platform include:
- Advertising and monetization
- User engagement with personalized and contextual experiences
- Virtual preload
- SIM app push
- Data rewards
- Programmatic CTV/OTT platform
As digital media continues to grow in relevance to the business community, and as the advertising world prepares for a cookieless experience, DigitalReef is uniquely positioned for continued growth. CoStrategix remains a trusted partner in shaping and executing the path forward as we scale the platform 3x in the near future to support the rapid growth of the business.
Our Approach
Working in close collaboration with the DigitalReef team from strategy through the execution of application platform engineering, CoStrategix has progressively reduced the cost and improved the operational efficiency of the platform. Some of the inflection points have included:
- While DigitalReef was 100% cloud-hosted from the start, it was still using IaaS for the database by hosting the database on VMs. CoStrategix and DigitalReef determined that they were spending too much time and money managing the database instead of adding features and functionality to the platform. So CoStrategix helped migrate to a native cloud database service. This resulted in better scalability and operational effectiveness and increased the stability of the platform.
- The next bottleneck was the analytics of the growing platform. While the platform could scale and acquire millions of records an hour, there was a bottleneck in capturing analytics as the platform grew. CoStrategix helped transform the analytics to be based on serverless techniques to improve the scalability and timeliness of the analytics.
- DigitalReef has pursued an aggressive acquisition strategy. CoStrategix has been a key partner in identifying the best technology strategies to bring together core capabilities from multiple acquisitions into a unified platform.
- CoStrategix also helps DigitalReef implement product improvements. They develop new product MVPs to test new concepts in the market and implement innovative capabilities for DigitalReef customers. For example, the first MVP eventually turned into DigitalReef’s Data Rewards platform.
- The CoStrategix team led the transition to Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) from ECS and docker-based services. This simplified the deployment of the platform services and created an environment that could scale dynamically based on workload fluctuations. Now, the platform takes advantage of the fully managed service, which makes it easy to deploy, manage, and scale containerized applications.
“CoStrategix has proven that they can implement complex, highly scalable solutions,” said Ramachandran said. “We could not have gotten to where we are today without CoStrategix’s partnership, technology leadership, and engineering talent.”
“CoStrategix doesn’t just say they have digital and data expertise. They’ve proven it over and over again, release after release.”
Gavin Kim
Siprocal Chief Strategy Officer
