About The Customer
BluHorn® is a web-based media buying software program designed to organize, schedule, and report media buys, whether for broadcast TV, cable TV, radio, outdoor or print, and digital media. This software, which was created by media buyers for media buyers, was developed with the input of more than 50 small to midsize advertising, marketing, and digital media firms throughout the United States.
BluHorn aims to provide the best media buying solution available at a price point that is affordable for small to midsize firms. They have worked to create a solution for all agencies, whether an agency buys one platform or many media in various markets. The software is web-based, requiring no downloads to computers or server storage.
Industry
Media and Entertainment
Type of Case Study
Application Modernization,
Managed Cloud Services
The Challenge
From media buying and planning to traffic management, BluHorn provides the best affordable solutions for small to midsize enterprises. BluHorn aims towards revolutionizing the media industry with insightful and actionable data. And with huge amounts of data in mind, their major challenge was the peak demand management and scalability.
Operating on an in-house PHP Framework, they required a solution that could easily scale on-demand, store massive amounts of data at a lower cost, and handle data of virtually any type. Their B2B application incurred massive data insights, slowing down the database, and increasing application downtime.
On a single-tier architecture, enclosing a single point of failure and limited scalability & reliability, BluHorn required to be migrated to the cloud from their collocated data center. They wanted to opt for SourceFuse’s application modernization and managed cloud services offering, which involved the rebuilding of their infrastructure to enable direct deployment of parts of the application into a production-ready hosted environment. The complete application modernization followed by maintenance of the infrastructure to help reduce operational overhead and increase performance efficiency.
Solution Proposed
SourceFuse proposed a three-fold solution catering to BluHorn’s application modernization and maintenance needs – Migrate, Modernize, and Manage Cloud Services. In the first phase, we planned on improving their infrastructure by performing a quick lift and shift to the AWS cloud. Given that they were paying for servers, even when they weren’t using them half the time, a serverless architecture was mandatory to save cost. Enhancing their framework by improving their logging mechanism and introducing a more robust error handling technique improved the security & reliability aspects respectively.
In the second phase, the decision processes were evaluated, for better visibility, accessibility, and reduction in turnaround time. Their time to market for new features was optimized by deploying a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. Moreover, we implemented automated security patching of the underlying OS, performed regular infrastructure scans for any vulnerabilities and passed the CIS Compliance Benchmark enabling their software to be protected from malicious or unauthorized traffic.
For enhancing their Customer Tech Support, we introduced a PubNub powered support chat system to connect buyers, planners, vendors, and clients. To bolster this chat application, and deliver a social media timeline-type feature, the chat app also streams important alerts and custom pieces of information, and creates a bot-like chat integration as well. SourceFuse’s Implementation of PubNub’s real-time worksheets provides a reliable and secure real time layer that allows BluHorn to operate more efficiently and create multi-user collaborative features.
Further, we integrated their ticketing system with FullStory to troubleshoot issues and resolve any concerns much faster. And, to enhance their customer experience, we modernized their UX with New Relic’s integrated features like continuous monitoring of the application & proactively fixing performance bottlenecks.
In the third and final phase, SourceFuse’s Managed Services Enterprise plan was selected to monitor and maintain the final product. For increased reliability, AWS AutoScaling paved the way, increasing availability by 99.99%. SourceFuse continues to maintain BluHorn’s infrastructure, operating system, database, and application as their managed services provider, whilst they focus on continuous growth and innovation.
Results and Benefits
99.99%
Availability:
Application Modernization with minimal downtime and visibility into hosting mechanism
35%
Cost Optimization:
By pay-per-use & managing the cost versus server utilization ratio
effectively
93%
Performance Efficiency Gain:
Introduction of Parallel processors, quick decision making and proper monitoring insights
173 %
Reduced Update Rating:
To calculate an Advertisment’s demographic, reach, and performance
What our Customers Say
“What I really get with SourceFuse is the ability to scale. A large part of my business is being able to personalize and customize my product to the needs of an agency or business purchasing a substantial amount of media. Partnering with SourceFuse has not only allowed me to reduce the operating cost and increase product performance. But given me the ability to spin up an additional server, compute, database, and most importantly additional development teams within days, and in some cases hours.”
– Wes Benwick, Vice-President & Software Architect, BluHorn