Singular Insights

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Global marketing powerhouse OneMagnify leverages talent and technology to help their clients prosper. CIO Andy Frey reveals what it takes to deliver marketing's many promises in the digital age.

Fortune 100 companies are technologically adept pioneers on the leading edge of change. Their inherent boldness is upheld with marketing strategies that hinge on big data’s key promise: to deliver actionable insights on every conceivable aspect of consumer behavior. Optimizing the big data applications that deliver on that pledge is a specialty of OneMagnify, a global agency whose clients make up a significant portion of that revered group of trailblazers.

To borrow a phrase, the Detroit-based firm is a full stack provider. In addition to brand and digital marketing, analytics, and technology OneMagnify designs, develops, and executes the IT solutions required to make sophisticated global marketing programs reach and resonate with their target audiences. With SSAE 18 SOC 2 certification—a high bar for marketing firms of OneMagnify’s size to clear—in addition to ISO 27001 certifications, their impressive managed services bona fides are on display.

Their recent effort to develop an industry-leading cloud application platform landed the company on IDG’s 2020 CIO 100 list, and garnered a CIO of the Year award for excellence from MichiganCIO. Leading the efforts at OneMagnify is Chief Information Officer Andrew Frey, who has legitimately forgotten more than what most of the savviest individuals in the business will ever know about big data. That expertise, and that of his carefully assembled team, is a powerful lure for companies working to make the utmost of their competitive advantages.

IDG explained the award-winning project this way: “The goal was to build a software defined application platform, built by code, that requires no manual intervention, self-healing, self-tuning, and allows developers a self-service to deploy applications.” The company partnered with VMware Tanzu Pivotal Labs to create the platform; a move typically undertaken by much larger organizations. “OneMagnify is one of a very few SMBs (if any) using the Pivotal Platform. Among the benefits are an increase in developer efficiency, improved IT staff engagement by using the best-in-class cloud computing application platform and allowing developer self-service, and enhanced security by patching weekly with no downtime, among others.”

The initiative at OneMagnify emerged from a desire to help their clients stay on the cutting-edge of technology while using their existing solutions. “We instilled confidence among our clients by showing that we could run their applications through existing platforms while making them more portable if they ever decide to bring them in-house,” Frey said.

Marketers as major IT players

By utilizing VMware Tanzu Pivotal Cloud Foundry, OneMagnify provides their clients with an always on, always available, world-class cloud computing platform. The platform, one of the most technologically advanced of its kind, has influenced the overall success of marketing programs, much to Frey and his team’s delight. “We had a major product launch program on the platform, and we saw that it was getting a lot more traffic. In response, our application team was able to adjust the settings and provide more capacity for it without having to involve the data center team,” he revealed. The app team member made more capacity available in minutes.

“As we were presenting a client with an email marketing-based solution, our developer was able to reflect their feedback on the production platform in real time. That’s the beauty of this platform—it enables our developers to quickly make changes, and with the mature processes we previously developed, we can share the changes with our clients within minutes on a live production site.”

OneMagnify is currently working with partners like Ahead to explore data containerization technologies. “We want to do the same automation that we've done with our front-end applications for our analytical and data applications. We want them to be secure and portable with the ability to run anywhere, whether it’s cloud based, on premise, or hybrid,” Frey said.

“Our success has been the result of our team’s ability to deliver world-class results,” Frey said. Kerry Schaffer, the Senior Director of Information Technology at OneMagnify, is the Tanzu platform owner who worked with Tanzu Application Director Raji Padmanaban, and Solution Architects Derric Moses and Anwar Qureshi on the initiative. “The initiative transformed the team, bolstering confidence and increasing their value as leaders in the space. Having been measured against industry-leading companies, they see that they are among the best and just as valuable,” Frey enthused.

While the OneMagnify name is three years old, the company has more than a 50-year pedigree. Three firms made up the company’s former identity, Marketing Associates, and as with most merged firms, had created silos of data that needed to be flattened, combined, and made as useful as possible—all part of a successful transition to OneMagnify that would boost their position on the world stage.

“We launched the OneMagnify name to consolidate our service offerings under a single entity. Because while our team is spread all across the globe, we always act as one—bringing together the power of strategic communications, technology, and analytics to deliver world-class solutions that provide powerful business performance for every client.”