Replace with Application Image Microsoft Azure Cortana Analytics Suite Helps Content Marketplace Analyze User Engagement “We collect and process terabytes of data each month to understand and predict how people engage with content. It’s a significant achievement for a company of our size, made possible by the scale and functionality of the Azure cloud.” – Tiam Korki, co-founder & CTO, Pressboard SITUATION Pressboard had traction from Day 1 and experienced rapid growth when it introduced a cost-per-read model. It required Pressboard to collect and process significant amounts of data to qualify reads. It needed a solution that could ingest thousands of events per second, then store, extract, transform, and load this data for visualization and transactions. Pressboard also had to balance expenses against spikes in traffic. MICROSOFT AZURE ISV: Pressboard Media Inc. WEB SITE: www.pressboardmedia.com LOCATION: Vancouver, B.C., Canada ORG SIZE: 9 employees MICROSOFT AZURE ISV PROFILE: Brands use the Pressboard Story Marketplace to create content with North America’s most influential publishers. Pressboard’s data-driven approach to content marketing enables companies to quickly find the right partners based on topic and target demographics, measure exactly how people engage with sponsored content, retarget their readers and pay only for qualified reads. SOLUTION The Microsoft Azure Cortana Analytics Suite of products gave Pressboard all the tools it needed to build a data pipeline that is able to scale on demand and with its needs. Pressboard’s server feeds the data to its Azure Service Bus Event Hubs, Azure Streaming Analytics processes the events and stores them in Azure Storage. Data Factory queues HDInsight Hadoop MapReduce jobs to process the data, loads Pressboard’s Azure SQL Data Warehouse using PolyBase and copies the results to Azure SQL Databases for reporting. Replace with Application Image BENEFITS The Microsoft Azure-based solution is able to grow with Pressboard and scale on demand to meet its traffic spikes. All the Azure Cortana Analytics Suite of products are PaaS offerings that enable Pressboard to focus on growing instead of managing infrastructure.