Agora S.A. Quickly Delivers Effective Web-Based Advertising Services by Improving Application Scalability and Availability
 
 

Agora S.A. Quickly Delivers Effective Web-Based Advertising Services by Improving Application Scalability and Availability

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Agora S.A. is one of the largest and best-known media companies in Poland and in Central and Eastern Europe. In addition to its portfolio of press titles, outdoor advertising media, film network, and radio stations, Agora runs several dozen topic-specific Web sites, including sites for news, classified ads, entertainment and social forums, integrated under the Gazeta.pl group. These Web sites are among the most popular in their categories. In 2011, the total reach of all Agora Web sites was 61.3% with 11.7 million users, which ranked Agora third among portal providers in Poland.

One of the company’s newest initiatives is an online advertisement service, driven by a dedicated ad creation system, which publishes targeted banner ads. The system uses as many as 200 user attributes associated with ad history and customer behavior information to serve up targeted ads in real-time. To optimize system operation, Agora deployed Oracle Coherence on 20 Java Virtual Machines. This architecture has dramatically boosted the ad creation system’s performance, scalability, and speed, As a result of deploying the Oracle solution, Agora can now support the rapidly growing number of ads without having to invest in new hardware.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Agora S.A.

  • “Oracle Coherence enables us to store information—such as historical customer data—in operating memory, while retaining related transaction processing benefits. With this unique configuration, we can distribute data to multiple processing locations, running on a scalable and efficient advertising publishing platform that drives new revenue growth.” – Krzysztof Madejski, Deputy Head, IT Department, Gazeta.pl, Agora SA

  • Support incremental online ad growth, following the launch of Agora’s own advertising network, while also providing ad generation services for third-party portals and Web sites
  • Support over 2 million daily portal visitors, while maintaining acceptable response time levels and processing up to 6,000 database-read operations and 1,000 database updates per second
  • Gain the ability to analyze banner ad information―including which banners are served for display on Web pages, their display frequency, and the sequence in which they are served―in real time, to provide more targeted advertising for customers


Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed Oracle Coherence on 20 Java Virtual Machine instances and three physical entry-level machines to achieve a scalable platform that can support Agora’s growing online ad publishing business
  • Replaced the previous information processing environment with Oracle Coherence, which delivers advertising data up to 10 times faster by working entirely in-memory, processing up to 6,000 database-read operations and 1,000 database updates per second
  • Achieved a record-breaking advertising, set-creation time of 0.2 seconds—from the moment the ad creation system accepts an order, through the analysis stage, up to displaying the banner on a Web page
  • Cut exponentially the time required to generate ads, using the same hardware environment
  • Decreased by eightfold the number of database operations per second, thereby cutting storage requirements in half
  • Gained near linear scalability―enabling the company to serve as many Web pages as needed to support sudden traffic spikes
  • Realized better database fault-tolerance with the new infrastructure, thus improving system security
  • Created new business opportunities for Agora, as it can now deliver more precise advertisement display schedules for specific users, which improves customer satisfaction and retention