Mobile technology company Run The Red has managed some of New Zealand’s highest profile text messaging promotional campaigns and processes up to six million SMS messages a month.
The fast-growing Wellington-based company’s clients include Hell’s Pizza, the New Zealand Drug Foundation, Vodafone, SPARC, McDonald’s, Panasonic and the Royal New Zealand Air Force.
As mobile marketing matures, client organisations are increasingly integrating Run The Red’s mobile applications into more broadly-based communications strategies, such as lead generation campaigns and elements of customer service. The company says with so much riding on its technology platform, it was quick to recognise the importance of its underlying IT infrastructure. It didn’t matter how clever its applications were, if its communications links couldn’t handle traffic volumes, or its backend processing power was lacking, its business would be in jeopardy.
The company’s operations director, Deborah Crowe, says clients expect Run The Red to enrich their customer relationships. "So we needed a level of confidence that as client demands grew and delivery got more complex our computing infrastructure was sufficiently robust to do the job."
This meant the company couldn’t contemplate technology bottlenecks or the normal headaches associated with scaling IT to meet escalating business demands. Run The Red chose Revera to host its mobile applications and associated campaign websites, SMS gateways and VPN connectivity with network providers Telecom and Vodafone.
Revera’s VDC (virtual data centre) computing infrastructure provisioning platform provides Run The Red with scalable, ready built, plug-in IT infrastructure to guarantee the on-demand availability and performance of its mobility applications and to take care of security and administration. Run The Red’s contract with Revera includes strict performance and availability indicators and the agreement means IT simply manages an IT contract rather than the vagaries of managing its own IT infrastructure.
"We wanted to avoid potential bottlenecks caused by an underpowered backend," says Crowe. "Technology infrastructure provision is not our core business – we’re an applications developer and solutions provider. Revera provides a level of reliability, scalability and security that is extremely important to us."
Choosing a hosted platform option has also strengthened Run The Red’s business development activities, she says. "It means that when we talk to prospects we deliver a different impression than if we said we managed our own IT. Most corporations use a specialist infrastructure provider because they know IT isn’t a core competency, and doing it yourself is not a business success factor. They appreciate the model and take us more seriously because we share a similar philosophy."
Revera group managing director Roger Cockayne says Run The Red typifies the type of customer Revera has picked up in recent times. "In the last four years we’ve gone from three customers to 170 and a lot of that is companies like Run The Red which is bringing new activity to market," Cockayne says.
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