Marketing automation software leader Marketo’s growth was outpacing the capabilities of its managed hosting service, so it began looking for a data center company to provide scalable and reliable data center services for its software-as-a-service infrastructure.
“Every time you mention Equinix to someone, they know who that is. There’s trust built behind the name,” said Nick Bonfiglio, Marketo’s vice president of operations and privacy, in an Equinix case study.
With Equinix, Marketo made the right choice. After moving its SaaS infrastructure to multiple Equinix data centers, it increased its end-user application performance and its profit margins by more than 20%.
Marketo, founded in 2007, designs marketing software that helps companies find new business, build relationships and cope with the complexity and pace of engaging with customers in real time.
Like many SaaS providers, Marketo initially outsourced its computing infrastructure to a single managed hosting firm while it established itself in the market. But when Marketo started handling billions of marketing interactions monthly, it hit limitations in its managed hosting platform. After rejecting the high cost and low reliability of building its own data center, Marketo chose Equinix to develop a distributed SaaS infrastructure across multiple Platform Equinix™ facilities to increase efficiency, lower costs and reduce the risk of service disruption to its customers.
“Everyone who cares about data center reliability knows about Equinix,” Bonfiglio said. “Having a good brand with good security best practices and state-of-the-art data centers was a key part of the message we wanted to convey to our customers.”
Equinix offers the most destinations of any data center provider, with more than 100 facilities in 32 top business markets on five continents. Marketo deployed its SaaS infrastructure in two Equinix locations: one in Silicon Valley and one in Ashburn, Va., near Washington, D.C.
This distributed data center strategy created a highly efficient technology platform that gave Marketo unprecedented control over its data center operations. It empowered the company to accommodate faster subscriber growth and deliver more content without increasing costs.
For example, Marketo sends more than 1 billion emails and processes 10 times that many marketing transactions each month. Massive data sets that used to take days to transmit are now replicated in a single day. Marketo’s end-user application performance increased more than 20% and its gross margins on subscriptions and services shot up from 67.5% in the first quarter of 2013 to 80.5% in Q1 2014.
“This project has already yielded some great benefits for our customers and was a key contributor to how we improved our gross margins for subscription and service,” said Phil Fernandez, Marketo Chief Executive Officer.
Download the entire Marketo case study.