Constant Contact is one of those companies you usually see in the background, most likely as a logo at the bottom of an email newsletter.  You can imagine the reach a company like this has, even as digital marketing is still in its infancy.  Constant Contact is growing alongside social media marketing trends, extending its client offerings into new areas for event promotions, online surveys, etc. Location-based marketing is a key area of development for the company, recently partnering with WeReward, while the recent acquisition of Bantam Live demonstrates Constant Contact’s interest in social CRM technology.  This horizontal growth is necessary for Constant Contact’s ability to weather the constant changes of consumer behavior, and the cloud is helping this growing company to manage its expansion.

When it comes to cloud adoption, Constant Contact is as careful as any other company, especially considering the massive amount of personal data that is managed by this marketing service.  It’s chosen Puppet Labs to ease its transition into cloud services, which it is utilizing for optimizing its own internally-operated infrastructure.  It’s one highly customized way in which cloud services, more interchangeable than ever, can be incorporated into a company’s own data warehouse, implementing key functions that work smoothly within an existing infrastructure.

Puppet Labs’  open source Cassandra data store is central to Constant Contact’s cloud strategy, as this service is easily implimented in a quick and cost effective manner.  Cost effectiveness is important for Constant Contact, as its business model relies on its low costs to end users.  The average client pays about $15 per month, so maintaining competive pricing was important in Constant Contact’s cloud consierations.  With more social media-related demands being placed on its business, Constant Contact also had to keep these things in mind when scaling up and out.

“One of the challenges you have when you start talking about social media marketing is the volume of data,” Dave Connors, VP of Operations at Constant Contacts, explains.  “That’s one of the reasons we chose Cassandra–we started with a smaller sample and ended up with a smaller cluster internally, which we used Puppet Labs to make an appliance for, so we can scale it horizontally at a lower cost.  It also stores a lot of data, introduces lots of technology to the company for running Cassandra, and easily allows us to transfer to the cloud if we need to.”

It’s this inter-directional support that attracted Constant Contact to Puppet Labs in particular, making a highly configurable transition in and out of the cloud.  Should Constant Contact’s developer team need a simple stack, Puppet Labs’ integration allows them to take advantage of what they have in order to expand when and where needed.  “I don’t think we’re ever going to have anything on the cloud, but we can rapidly deploy and add cycles, and leverage the infrastructure that way,” Connors adds.

Certainly, the protection of Constant Contact’s internal data center of extreme importance, and remains a core factor when determining how the company makes its shift to cloud services.  Scaling commodities, however, becomes a question of management.  This is where Puppet Labs comes into play, with Constant Contact’s Manager of Systems Mark Schena noting that they were able to shave at least 6 months, and millions of dollars, off their internal optimization process, had they run it in house.

The team-up with Constant Contact is another high-profile win for Puppet Labs, especially as it expands its own product offerings around Enterprise cloud solutions.  It’s something Constant Contact is considering, and will adopt if proven useful in their case.