CUSTOMER'S BUSINESS: Marketing/Sales Automation Software-as-a-Service

CHALLENGE: Achieve infrastructure economies of scale and only add IT staff resources that directly contribute to growth of the business

RACKSPACE SOLUTION: Dedicated servers, Hosted Email

BUSINESS OUTCOME: Achieved rapid worldwide operational scalability without upfront investment

SaaS company uses Rackspace dedicated hosting to meet growing worldwide demand for its services

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Marketo is a revenue performance management company, transforming how marketing and sales teams of all sizes work—and work together—to accelerate predictable revenue. Marketo’s solutions enable explosive revenue growth throughout the revenue cycle, from the earliest stages of demand generation and lead management to deal close and continued customer loyalty.

Marketo Lead Management gives marketers the power and flexibility to automate demand generation campaigns and deliver high quality leads with less effort. Sales departments use Marketo Sales Insight to better understand, prioritize and interact with their hottest leads and opportunities, closing more business faster. And Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics enables marketers to measure, optimize and forecast the revenue cycle.

THE SITUATION

From its early days as a SaaS start-up, Marketo desired to focus its efforts on building its business rather than building operational infrastructure and staff. They wanted to only add staff that increased the value off their Marketo offering itself, rather than focusing on infrastructure capacity, colocation, racking servers, etc. And while they planned to dedicate staff to 24x7 support of their application, they needed a hosting partner who would provide analogous 24x7 infrastructure support. Finally, anticipating rapid growth, they needed a partner that could help them scale with a worldwide footprint. From a technology perspective, Marketo wanted an infrastructure that utilized technology to continually drive down COGS while maintaining the highest levels of reliability. This would require a combination of traditional dedicated hosting as well as the availability of new cloud solutions; it would also require a hosting partner with a demon- strated record of enterprise-quality service delivery and customer commitment.

RACKSPACE SOLUTION

Marketo chose Rackspace because, as the leading specialist in the hosting and cloud computing industry, it had the experience, scale and track record to meet their operational infrastructure business objectives. To enable their internal IT team to focus on managing their applications, Marketo made Rackspace the managed infrastructure extension of its internal IT organization.

“With the resources we had available, we couldn’t have racked and stacked and operationalized all the infrastructure we required in three colocation facilities in three locations worldwide with the speed we required,” remarks Nick Bonfiglio, VP of Operations for Marketo,“Rackspace turnaround was terrific.”

To meet the reliability and availability requirements of their customers, Marketo selected Rackspace Dedicated Hosting along with Rackspace Intensive Support for its core applications. As a SaaS company, Marketo selected Rackspace Hosted Email as their corporate email solution, reducing their cost of delivering email services.

THE SUCCESS

Marketo has experienced very rapid growth and worldwide adoption of its solutions. It currently operates in three Rackspace colocation facilities worldwide, delivering over 50 million emails a month for its customers that, in turn, generate 110 million leads. To support this rapid growth, its Rackspace infrastructure needs have gone up at a corresponding pace, quadrupling to support an annualized customer growth rate of 200 percent.

Rackspace has successfully delivered and managed the infrastructure necessary to support Marketo’s growth, while delivering the reliability that Marketo customers require. Because of Rackspace’s scale, Marketo knows that they can accommodate their rapid growth without the lag times and expense they would have experienced if they had to acquire equipment and staff in tight turnaround situations.

CUSTOMER’S FINAL WORDS

“Rackspace has allowed us to hit our stride, without having to be overly worried about infrastructure cost and management. They continue to provide real value in helping us scale and grow quickly, adding capacity in a predictable and easy-to-calculate way,” Bonfiglio adds, “This is very important from a P&L perspective, as we don’t have to spend ahead to meet infrastructure goals. It’s a great partnership and Rackspace will be a component of Marketo’s infrastructure and a large part of our footprint for a long time.”