Media agency relies on cloud computing to deliver on-demand marketing services to global clients and cuts costs by 60%

Media agency relies on cloud computing to deliver on-demand marketing services to global clients and cuts costs by 60%

UK media agency Bezier has revealed the results of a collaboration with UK IT and communications provider Star, which it said has helped it increase sales for its retail clients.

Over the last 12 months, the two partners taken Bezier’s media business, which relies on state-of-the art creative and production processes, and created a customer-facing service based on Star’s cloud computing platform.

Bezier provides retail marketing services to clients including Argos, Boots, Coca Cola, Disney, Honda and Unilever. It provides its retail clients with a range of services from designing creative marketing campaigns, through to their execution using direct mail and managing the point-of-purchase (PoP) materials in-store.

By replacing its legacy IT infrastructure with a private cloud service and communications and networking capabilities from Star, Bezier has been able to tailor its services to meet demands from Bezier’s clients to automate, often complex, project-specific marketing processes.

Using cloud to transform service

This new direction for the company now means it delivers its own marketing software solution to client marketing teams, who increasingly expect are that complex services to be delivered at the click of a mouse.

Chris Airey, Bezier chief information officer (CIO), said: “The future of Bezier was clearly to digitise our offering, streamlining processes and reducing service delivery complexity. We did not want to be told by our IT supplier what was possible, instead we wanted to work with a partner that would support our new strategy and learn with us as we embark on this journey. Star was willing to evolve with us; flexibility was in their DNA.”

The cost and business agility benefits have also been tangible, Airey added: “As part of the cultural move to embrace cloud computing, we now require less hands-on IT administration, reducing those costs by 60%. We have been able to re-negotiate existing contracts in order to replace them with something that would accelerate the execution of our plans. Fortunately, we were not held hostage to the IT decisions of the past.”

Ricky Hudson, Star chief executive, commented that CIOs had been saying for some time that the best private cloud implementations are not just cost effective, but able to transform their business.

He added: “Our belief is that while others are talking about and debating what cloud computing means to them, forward thinkers such as Bezier get real and achieve differentiated competitive advantage by choosing to partner with Star.”