With an audience of more than 236 million unique browsers across 24 countries, PROMOTORA DE INFORMACIONES, S.A. (PRISA) is one of the Spanish-speaking world’s leading media companies. Its brands include El Pais, Santillana and El Huffpost.
Producing and distributing high-quality news, entertainment and educational content to international viewers and readers means managing hundreds of different information systems—and optimizing them to support the best audience experience.
For PRISA, performance is key. Application problems can have immediate and detrimental impact on consumers’ perception of the brand. “A one-second time difference in displaying content makes a huge difference to our audience’s experience,” says Jorge Tome Hernando, PRISA Tecnologia’s Director of IT Architecture, Operations, Security and Workplace.
PRISA has adopted cloud-native technologies for scalability and agility, but the company still had a number of systems built over legacy technologies. “Managing performance in such complex environments is really difficult,” says Hernando. “There are a lot of different pieces and dependencies. When we have a performance problem, trying to find the root cause is difficult and very time consuming.”
Despite having several monitoring solutions in place, PRISA lacked the end-to-end visibility into applications, infrastructure and underlying services that it needed to ensure application performance. “We had insight into how our infrastructure was running,” Hernando explains. “But we did not have vision into the processes of the overlapping technologies. Connecting the points and understanding the relationships was the difficult part.”
Global reach & coverage
PRISA provides news, education and entertainment to 236 million people in 24 countries
Proactive issue resolution
Using Instana Observability, PRISA resolves application issues proactively before they affect service
Working with technology partner Hopla! Software, PRISA implemented the IBM Instana® Observability solution and quickly gained the end-to-end visibility that the company needed.
With Instana’s straightforward, single-agent deployment, PRISA gained immediate results. “The deployment is easy, very easy,” says Hernando. “The cost is reasonable and indexed to the volume of the infrastructure, NOT to the volume of the traffic we manage, which was really important to us managing such high volumes of traffic.”
PRISA appreciated Instana’s automatic and continuous discovery to combat the complexity of the company’s cloud-native stack and all of its moving pieces.
Hernando explains: “Our infrastructure is very liquid; servers and services appear and disappear dynamically based on demand. Instana automatically visualizes our applications and infrastructure in real time, helping us discover business dependencies that we didn’t know existed.”
In the end, it was an easy decision to select Instana based on three key factors: cost, ease of deployment and the evolving pace of the platform.
Engineering time, especially when keeping services performing, is very costly for organizations. Even more so for publishers, whose page load times are a critical metric for consumer experiences and revenue streams.
With Instana, PRISA can resolve application issues before they impact customers. Keeping systems operating efficiently is no longer an issue, allowing the company to free up engineering resources that can be used to innovate, evolve and improve services to better compete in the marketplace.
“Instana provides a complete vision of how our services are running, helping us achieve our goals of performance, reliability and cost optimization,” says Hernando.
One of the world’s leading education and media groups, PRISA (link resides outside of ibm.com) creates and distributes entertainment, news and educational content in the international Spanish and Portuguese-speaking markets. Its presence in Brazil and Portugal, and in the growing US Hispanic market, opens up a global market of more than 700 million people. PRISA is based in Madrid.
Hopla! Software (link resides outside of ibm.com) helps medium and large companies achieve digital transformation through the modernization of applications and infrastructures both on premises and in the cloud. Hopla! offers services that allow rapid transformation, including consulting, 24×7 support, managed services and on-demand training to help customers establish internal expertise in the new technologies they have implemented.
Legal
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Produced in the United States of America, September 2021.
IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Instana, and IBM Z are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/trademark.
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
The performance data and client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions.THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided.