Acxiom - IBM Client Reference Video

Founded in 1969, Acxiom is a leader in marketing services and technology that combine consumer data and analytics, databases, data integration, and consulting to enable marketers to successfully reach their audiences. From its headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, and offices in the U.S., Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and South America, Acxiom provides its information management services to the global marketplace. Acxiom is a US$1.1 billion company with 5,700 clients in 40 countries. It sends 1.5 billion emails a month, supports 17 percent of the postal mailings sent in the United States and counts 350 of the Fortune 500 as its customers.

Video Transcript

Senior Vice President, Global Technology Services, Acxiom

Acxiom is the largest provider of marketing services throughout the world. What distinguishes us is our ability to help our customers understand their customers better.

(0:12) John Meyer
CEO and President, Acxiom

We were always the guys who said “you’ve got a message, tell us which customers would be most responsive to that – good – those people; let us find you more people like that.” And then deliver that message to those people and then measure what you get from it. If there’s an ROI; I spent a marketing dollar and this is what I got from it in sales. And with Acxiom, it’s measureable. It’s addressable. They know what they get.

(0:36) David Guzman
We had 22,500 servers and we have 12 petabytes of data. We do around two and a half trillion transactions a month. We have 500 million consumers, 1,500 data points on each, and growing markedly.

(0:49) John Meyer
And so those combinations to deal with, sort through massive amounts of data, find that one nugget of gold that helps you shape a message and then deliver that in a sub-second response time, in a world where eyeballs are moving from website to website so quickly that if you can’t be that responsive you miss it. Well, nobody can do that except Acxiom.

(1:12) David Guzman
So we saw where we had a great opportunity to take our biggest and best customers from environments in which we had this very big iron to the eX5 from IBM. We found that we got 5x the performance from what we had before, at 15x less cost. This is very, very compelling. The other parts of our environment that we have is we’ve gone IBM in a big way in storage. We love IBM’s storage lineup from the DS8700s to the DS5300s. We really like the XIV platform a lot. And the N series as well, which gives us great flexibility in implementation. We love the SVC software platform that allows us to manage our storage across multiple tiers, even to competitive storage platforms. We’ve been able to achieve an impressive virtualization ratio of 35-1 using the 3850 X5.

(2:04) John Meyer
When we make technology decisions, it’s with a foresight of trying to say where we think the world is going. And so having a partner like IBM creates a real positive foundation.

(2:16) David Guzman
The System x is the star of the show today. We like the wide variety of solutions that it gives us, from blades to rack-mounted, various standards of power and compute and various memory configurations. The 3850 x5 is certainly helping us serve our customers better. We’ve gotten some wonderful notes back from some of our customers that said you told us that the performance was better, but now that we see it, wow. It blows us away.

(2:42) John Meyer
The IBM mindset has always been “what does it take to make the customer successful.” That makes a great partnership. Our technology platform is very important obviously and it’s a foundation. So it’s a competitive advantage that we have.

(2:55) David Guzman
Clearly, when I look at the eX5, the factors that give us a competitive advantage include certainly, the cost equation, no doubt about it. And it includes the fact that it helps us handle our essential problem. And our essential problem is we’re falling under the weight of the massive scale that we have, and the variety of solutions and customers that we have as a service-provider. Now if we can take all that complexity and reduce it down, and distill it down, so that we can provide simple, cost-effective, powerful solutions to our customers, that’s the compelling story for us. From software to storage to servers, IBM is a huge and important partner of Acxiom.