Sydney's Collaboro moves to private cloud with Macquarie Cloud Services

Macquarie Cloud Services said it has signed a deal with Collaboro that saw the Australian digital asset management company get out of public cloud and move to private cloud, realising savings of 30 per cent initially.

Collaboro manages digital media assets for McDonalds Australia and New Zealand, Optus, Sportsbet, Youi, the Department of Education and others, and manages over 3.5 petabytes of data currently.

This data cannot be compressed to save space, Collaboro founder and chief executive Warwick Boulter said.

“Compressing data is not an option in these circumstances because once the pixel is gone, it’s gone, and the quality is lost forever. We’ve built our technology to maintain that quality while maximising efficiency," Boulter explained.

Collaboro said it picked Macquarie Cloud Services to develop a solution leveraging its Launch Private Cloud, with no egress or ingress network charges.

Boulter said Australian companies use a stockpile of existing assets for different marketing and ad campaigns for brand consistency.

It does however mean moving large files around, which would increase transfer costs as the data stockpile grows.

Thanks to no egress/ingress network charges, the Macquarie Cloud Services solution keeps that cost at zero.

The 30 per cent cost savings initially is projected to rise to around 50 per cent, as the environment scales and more data is added.

Collaboro's Launch Private Cloud platform is built on Dell Technologies' ECS Enterprise Object Storage and PowerEdge servers along with a high-speed Megaport cloud bandwidth connection.

The digital asset management company is also developing artificial intelligence driven government, risk and compliance (GRC) capabilities, with searchability that can automatically label, look for and identify specific people, objects, words and more within images and videos.

“We have gambling, insurance and alcoholic beverage clients who adhere to legislation on what can be shown in their advertisements,” Boulter said.

“We will shortly have the ability to apply rules within our SaaS platform to run intelligent searches over their media assets to make sure they’re compliant with the law and provide immediate reporting and dashboarding of GRC topics," he added.

"This saves so much time and lowers regulatory risk," Boulter said.

“The additional capacity we have with Macquarie Cloud Services helps to enable these advances because you need a long data runway once AI is involved."

They’re on that journey with us, redesigning their cloud services and data centres for the AI era,” he said.