Macquarie Cloud to preserve data quality for Australian companies

Author: Isha Jain

Macquarie Cloud Services (MCS), part of Macquarie Technology Group has announced that it has signed a deal with an Australian digital asset management company, Collaboro, to store and preserve the quality of media assets for the country’s largest brands.

Collaboro works with government agencies and enterprise marketing teams including McDonald’s Australia and New Zealand, Optus, Sportsbet, Youi, The NSW Department of Education and many more. It provides unique Australian-engineered SaaS technology that solves the problem of centrally storing, managing, surfacing and sharing large scale digital media asset libraries. The company manages more than 3.5PB of data, equivalent to around 70 million tall filing cabinets.

As Collaboro’s business grew, it was seeking alternatives to its previous public cloud solution, as storage and egress/ingress (transferring data to and from the cloud) costs started skyrocketing. Founder and CEO, Warwick Boulter, says the amount of data involved in video and imagery can be astonishing.

“The Avatar sequel is believed to have around 18.5PB of data attached to it, but that number pales compared to the amount of data major brands around Australia hold for their advertising and marketing programs,” says Warwick.

“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.”

Collaboro has had a process of continuing investment in platform and process, focused on core strategic topics of managing customer data with lower and more predictable costs, and on preparing customer data for the future of generative AI. It selected Macquarie Cloud Services to develop a unique solution leveraging its ‘Launch Private Cloud’, which provided an instant cost reduction of about 30%. That saving is projected to rise to around 50%, as the environment scales and more data is added.

Crucially, the system has zero egress or ingress charges, and vastly more predictable head-room costs for scaling of compute and AI resourcing – which present as major benefits for Collaboro’s customers.

“Australian companies use a stockpile of existing assets to weave into different marketing and ad campaigns,” says Warwick. “That’s important for brand consistency, but it means moving large data files around more than would be typical in other departments. As the data stockpile grows, so can the transfer costs and Macquarie Cloud Services keeps this element of cost at exactly zero.

“Further, the ability for our customers to leverage their vast marketing asset pool as a training set for future generative engines will rely heavily on that asset pool being easily available and deployable, that is, not constrained by egress and transfer costs.”

The Launch Private Cloud platform is built on Dell Technologies infrastructure solutions, including Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage and Dell PowerEdge Servers. It is also equipped with a high-speed Megaport cloud bandwidth connection, and is contained and managed from Macquarie Data Centres’ sovereign, government-certified facilities for enhanced data security and protection, an essential requirement for government and enterprise CMOs and CIOs when it comes to sensitive data.

AI searchability keeps regulated industries compliant

To further enhance its technology, Collaboro is developing AI-driven government, risk and compliance (GRC) capabilities – searchability that can automatically label, search for, and identify specific people, things, words and more within images and video content. The sheer volume of new assets being generated and presented to market across a multitude of channels inside heavily regulated industries makes it impossible to be done manually, but is vital particularly for customers in these highly regulated industries.

It is aiming to help companies utilise the myriad AI-generation tools for imagery and videos by presenting learning datasets, so that customers can tailor generative engines specifically to their brand through the use of machine learning (ML) on existing collateral.

Macquarie Cloud Services’ Head of Private Cloud, Jonathan Staff, says, “Data is always growing, but in an industry where quality is everything, it’s easy to lose control and even easier for costs to spiral.”

“Collaboro has solved this issue. It’s foresight to add further value by incorporating AI searchability into its stack also shows how in tune the company is with its customer needs. Our Private Cloud is critical at a time when cloud costs are rising and choice is diminishing, because we can manage the data while balancing cost, security and sovereignty.”