How Azure and Open Source Software Boosted Admetricks Into The Big Time
Today’s Featured BizSpark Startup is Admetricks from Chile.
Felipe del Sol was a man on a mission. Bored with his investment day job, he was looking for startup opportunities to settle the restless entrepreneurial soul inside. Then, by sheer coincidence, one practically fell into his lap.
Felipe del Sol, Co-Founder and CEO
“My brother is actually the one responsible for the Admetricks concept,” says del Sol, co-founder and CEO of the Chilean BizSpark startup. “He was working for a large retail company in online marketing, focused primarily on understanding the competition, when he came up with the basis for our startup.”
Patricio, del Sol’s brother and co-founder, realized that a virtual crawl through online publishers to identify their campaigns was a great way to uncover competitor strategies. And those strategies could be worth quite a bit to the right customers. That realization led to the launch of Admetricks, a service that monitors online media by collecting online advertising campaigns from publishers and providing reports about those campaigns to clients.
“Our biggest ‘aha’ moment came when we made our first sale to Universal McCann,” says del Sol. “That made us realize we were really onto something people wanted!”
More validation came in the form of top-tier clients such as Yahoo!, El Mundo, and more than 35 more large corporations. Each wants the competitive intelligence Admetricks produces.
Currently operating in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Spain, Admetricks uses more than 300 Microsoft Azure server instances to process data. When asked, ‘Why Azure?’ del Sol explains that he first got excited about the cloud platform when introduced to it during his attendance in the Start-up Chile program.
Azure’s flexibility opens up plenty of opportunities to use OSS, says del Sol.
“As a young business, we couldn’t afford to have that many instances even though we needed them,” adds del Sol. “But through the BizSpark Plus program and Azure, we can. Another plus is that Azure works with open source software. We were already using Python and it was easy to add that to Azure.”
He says that Azure lets Admetricks create small instances that help scale services as the startup grows. Savings in development costs and solid performance then led Admetricks to pursue the open source software avenue.
The Admetricks infrastructure, in fact, is built on top of multiple OSS options in addition to Python: Ubuntu Linux, MongoDB and MariaDB. The OSS system management infrastructure Ansible oversees much of the OSS activity.
“If anyone is thinking about building in the cloud, I’d tell them to check out the performance for the needs of the entire infrastructure and the customer services of each provider. Don’t just look at cost!”
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Microsoft is helping these startups succeed through its BizSpark program. To join or see other startup stories, visit us at our website here. To listen to our startups, check out these podcasts on devradio here.
About BizSpark: Microsoft BizSpark is a global program that helps startups succeed by giving free access to Microsoft Azure cloud services, software and support. BizSpark members receive up to $750 per month of free Microsoft Azure cloud services for 3 years: that’s $150 per month each for up to 5 developers. Azure works with Linux and open-source technologies such as Linux, Ruby, Python, Java and PHP. BizSpark is available to startups that are privately held, less than 5-years-old and earn less than $1M in annual revenue.