Founded in 2010 by games industry veteran Chris Wright and data mining expert Mark Robinson, deltaDNA aims to maximise the true potential of games on all platforms. Its technology is designed to make the gaming experience faster, smooth, and more rewarding for players, while enabling companies to get closer to their customers through powerful analytics and personalisation tools.
Established in Edinburgh, deltaDNA experienced rapid growth in the first few years of its existence, expanding into the USA with a presence in San Francisco.
The very nature of our business requires us to be agile in everything that we do.
The challenge
Prior to the project, deltaDNA was using an on-premise solution to manage workloads and customer data. This had been suitable in the early phases of the company’s growth, but as its influence in the industry grew, a need for more scalable infrastructure arose. This is the nature of modern gaming: many games experience cycles where activity spikes and then quickly drops back down. With Monthly Activity Users (MAU) growing at an exponential rate, it is important for deltaDNA to have the capability to cope with this.
A move to cloud was essential to sustain its growth.
Speaking in more detail about the challenge, Mark Robinson said: “We had operated quite well using on-prem infrastructure for a good few years, but we reached a point where this was simply no longer sufficient to meet our wider aims.
“Gaming is becoming richer and more diverse by the day, so we needed to make a change to ensure we can keep pace with the industry and continue to provide the insights and performance for which we had become known. This meant taking steps to make our infrastructure more flexible and scalable, so that we could better cope with the intense yet changeable demands of the gaming world.”
The fact that they only pay for the infrastructure they use will have a huge financial impact.
The solution
deltaDNA made the decision that a move to cloud was essential to sustain its growth. When weighing up its options, the company identified GCP as the preferred environment for their requirements, given Google’s positive track record and competencies in areas such as containerisation and re-platforming.
The next stage was to find a partner to help deliver the project. Claranet had worked closely with a gaming pod at Google prior to this project and had extensive knowledge of the unique demands of the industry. With this in mind, deltaDNA chose Claranet to assist it with the new implementation, which centered on a full migration into a new, scalable GCP cloud environment. This process included a full Production Readiness Review (PRR), a Google solution that Claranet provides for all its customers, which ensures that everything is done correctly at each stage of the process.
Claranet proved to be an excellent collaborative partner throughout the migration process.
Mark explained: “Technology is at the heart of everything we do, so we’re generally quite proficient when it comes to this side of things and wanted to maintain a strong degree of autonomy with how we implement and manage a new solution.
“However, we needed some extra help in certain areas – such as automation and networking – to make sure our move to the cloud was a smooth and successful one. We’re also very interested in embracing containerisation in the near future, so wanted to work with a provider that could bring the relevant expertise in this area. Given Claranet’s experience with GCP, the partnership seemed like a great fit.”
The result
The project was completed in the space of a few months, proving to be a slick, efficient process that is now providing a range of tangible benefits for deltaDNA. The fact that the deltaDNA team already has a high level of tech expertise has been instrumental in the resounding success of the project, as minimal upskilling was required to make the most of the GCP solution.
Mark added: “We’re delighted with how the new implementation is performing. We’re now able to deliver analytics and insight services much more efficiently than before, which is already having a powerful impact on our customers and the players they serve. Crucially, we’re also now very much prepared for the future, with the new GCP capabilities meaning we’re in an ideal position to embrace further automation or additional innovations like containerisation as and when we need to.
“Claranet proved to be an excellent collaborative partner throughout the migration process. The team was there to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, but was also mindful of the areas where we wanted to maintain our own control. It has been a truly collaborative relationship, where we’re free to develop and mould the solution to our individual needs, but still have access to the Claranet team should we need it.”