Going all-in with AWS has given us the power to experiment―to have ideas, to test, and then compare results. This enables us to deliver cost-effective solutions to our clients in record time and has freed us from the tribal instincts of yesterday’s wasteful IT thinking.  
Al Hepworth Chief Technology Officer

London-based IMD Optimad provides data and campaign management tools for the media industry. The company’s solutions—including CARIA, the UK/Ireland central transactional platform for TV, video-on-demand, and cinema—connect media owners, media buyers, and creative agencies, helping streamline campaign processing and save time and money. Its parent company, Group IMD, was founded in 1996. Since then, Group IMD has continued to develop collaboration solutions for video advertising content around the globe.

 

● The Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité (ARPP) is the advertising industry’s non-profit self-regulatory body. It requires mission-critical services to be provided under exacting service-level agreements and with high system availability and minimal downtime. ARPP commissioned IMD Optimad to create ARPP.TV, providing regulatory clearance for commercials broadcast and streamed in France.

● On-demand scalable processing was needed to cope with peaks in usage without the expense of long-term licensing and hardware maintenance commitments.

● IMD Optimad wanted to cut the cost and complexity of its IT. Its products ran on a suite of servers in a data center in London, with a disaster recovery setup in a separate location.

● Developers didn’t have the flexibility to experiment and wanted faster access to resources in order to speed time to market.

● Using AWS, IMD Optimad created ARPP.TV. The solution provides clearance information and campaign metadata via a web user interface and an API for TV and online commercials broadcast in France.

● The company uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), adjusting the size and type of instances for cost-effective performance. Content handling for video is built around open-source technologies using Amazon Simple Workflow Service (Amazon SWF) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Amazon Glacier provides low-cost archiving. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), configured using AWS CloudFormation, provides the backbone to a software-defined network infrastructure that includes virtual private networks to many third parties.

● All IMD Optimad developers work within Amazon WorkSpaces, providing secure remote team working and business continuity.


● 50 percent faster time to market at half the cost: This complex project, which involved collaboration between three internal teams and three external vendors, was completed in just eight months. In addition, Marie-Pierre Bordet, vice president & general manager of the Association of Communication Agencies, says, “ARPP.TV has increased operational efficiency and is cost efficient for all users.”

● High availability for mission-critical platform: IMD Optimad achieves over 99.98 percent availability with AWS to deliver a consistent service to customers across Europe. Mohamed Mansouri, chief information officer at ARPP, says, “The high availability of ARPP.TV with AWS and the responsive support from IMD Optimad’s customer and technical support teams have allowed us to deliver new, strong service levels such as the Premium Service, where the clearance decision is provided within one hour. These preclearance requests are made from all parts of the world. It gives us the ability to respond to the TV advertising market’s needs in a simple and flexible way.”

● Infrastructure aligns with agile development processes: With AWS, developers at IMD Optimad have the flexibility to treat infrastructure as code.

● Reduced risk of security incidents: The removal of vulnerable desktop operating systems from within the organization reduces the cyber-attack surface area and lowers the risk of exploits and data breaches.

● Simple, consistent support process: AWS provides responsive, high-quality services covering all aspects of infrastructure. IMD Optimad’s AWS account manager provides a single point of escalation and rapid access to expert consultancy services.

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