comScore Delivers Box Office Stats in Near Realtime with the Oracle Database Appliance
BUSINESS CHALLENGES
To succeed in one of the most competitive industries, movie producers and distributors need to get up-to-the-minute reports on box office performance and audience trends nationwide. That’s why they turn to comScore, a leading cross-platform measurement company that precisely measures audiences, brands, and consumer behavior everywhere.
Collecting and analyzing data around the clock from thousands of movie theatres is no simple task. The increasing demand for just-in-time performance stats has put tremendous pressure on comScore’s database and analytics infrastructure. In years past, it wasn’t uncommon for the company’s computing platform to fall out of sync with its upper-tier analytics and statistical applications.
“There were painful times when the hardware and operating system weren’t playing nice with our apps,” says Tim Pitzer, SVP, Theatrical Worldwide IT & Operations, comScore. The result: database queries could sometimes slow to a crawl, forcing the IT team to spend valuable time trying to decipher the underlying issues. As Pitzer noted, “We were spending too much time tuning versus analysis, and throwing resources at problems that could be better deployed doing more strategic and innovative things.”
THE CLOUD CREEK SOLUTION
For comScore, this was the perfect time to switch to a next-generation database infrastructure that could remove all the diversions and delays caused by out-of-tune hardware and software. To make the right choice, comScore turned to Cloud Creek Systems, a partner it trusted from multiple previous projects.
“For our movie industry clients, time is of the essence. Oracle Database Appliance provides a reliable, high-performance platform that helps our clients know immediately how their movies are performing in every theatre across North America.”
The IT consultant and Oracle Platinum Partner introduced comScore to Oracle Database Appliance, an Oracle Engineered System, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, designed specifically to optimize database and application performance. “ODA was the right thing to do and the price was competitive,” Pitzer says. Cloud Creek completed the initial installation of the system four years ago, and today comScore continues to run its core North American box-office analytics on ODA with “great uptime and performance.”
COMSCORE’S BENEFITS
The move to Oracle Database Appliance dramatically simplified day-to-day operations for comScore’s IT group, all but eliminating conflicts between the hardware, database, and applications. Although the company previously tried to deploy a clustered database solution across multiple commodity devices, the IT team struggled to make it operate smoothly. “Our data changes so quickly that the chatter between the nodes slowed everything down, and the overhead to keep everything in sync was cost prohibitive,” Pitzer explains. “With ODA, we did away with all the twiddling of knobs needed to get the hardware and software to work together,” Pitzer says.
The IT executive likes to highlight ODA’s other advantages, including easier system maintenance, improved disaster recovery, and better development and testing capabilities. Oracle’s pre-optimized engineered system was also simple to implement, consuming just a fraction of the time the IT team formerly took to build a traditional home-grown system. Today, as it eyes an upgrade to the next release of ODA, Pitzer is reserving just three weeks for the move, compared to four months for its previous upgrades.
From a business standpoint, Oracle Database Appliance and Cloud Creek are giving comScore a solid footing in its efforts to drive growth and innovation. “We have now minimized any database impairments and surprises—which if they occurred at the wrong time could be painful for our business,” Pitzer says. Now the company can concentrate on what it does best: delivering box office stats to its movie industry clients in near real-time, enabling them to make timely, informed decisions.
LOOKING AHEAD
Down the road, comScore hopes to leverage its ODA platform to better analyze customer sentiment through social media, even before a movie opens in theatres. “Social networks are good indicators of engagement, so we are excited about factoring in that part of the picture,” Pitzer says. When comScore is ready to tackle new projects like this, there is no longer any question that IT will be up for the task. “I’m not worried about collecting, storing, or summarizing data because our infrastructure is so scalable,” Pitzer explains.
WHY CLOUD CREEK
As a data-centric company, comScore was hesitant at first to outsource management of its database environment. But the company quickly realized that its true expertise was in industry analytics, not everyday database operation. “We took a leap of faith with Cloud Creek, but it was absolutely the right choice.” Pitzer says. “Their people are really smart and engaged.” Cloud Creek contributes value to comScore in multiple ways, providing ongoing database monitoring and optimization. Beyond that, Cloud Creek serves as an on-call strategic advisor. “Whenever we are looking at adding new functionality or new ways to track data, Cloud Creek has a seat at the table,” Pitzer says, adding that he also relies on the partner to alert him to new technology developments that could benefit the business.
