This article contains information on a legacy performance enhancement project that has rolled out to all customers and, in some circumstances, has been superseded by other performance enhancements. It will remain posted for historical purposes but should not be referred to.

 

What is “Project Orion"?

 

As the number of customer touchpoints expands, and the volume of digital signals from customers increases exponentially, modern marketers need a way to harness this data to deliver the personalized experiences that customers expect.

 

Project Orion is about big data ingestion and processing at speed and scale.

 

Marketo has spent the past year building a new big data architecture that allows Marketo to ingest and process trillions of customer behaviors. “Project Orion” is the code name of the development project to build a big-data infrastructure and first set of services that take advantage of it.

 

This platform is built using technologies that were pioneered first at Google, Linkedin or Facebook, such as Apache hadoop, an open framework for distributed storage and processing of high volume data and other scale technologies.

 

What are the benefits to customers?

 

The platform innovations include 6 specific scale and performance improvements:

  • Track web events (via Munchkin) on any pages of your site without traffic volume restrictions

  • Find People instantly when searching in the Marketo database

  • Get up-to-date Smart Lists instantly with real-time membership updates and faster loading time

  • Import People lists into the Market database in a fraction of the time

  • Accelerate the import of Custom Activities into Marketo

  • Generate Web Page Activity and Company Web Activity reports in less time

 

Plus, by establishing Marketo’s big data architecture, it creates the foundation for other next-generation platform services for performance and scale in the future.

 

Does Project Orion solve issues not on the list above?

 

Project Orion improves scalability and performance for the use cases listed above. Performance for use cases not on the list above are not expected to improve with Project Orion.

 

Customers with large data sets often experience the most significant performance gains in these areas. The new architecture doesn’t degrade these or other areas in any way.

 

When is it available? What’s the roll out plan?

 

The Project Orion development effort is GA and Marketo’s global data centers have been upgraded to our high-scale infrastructure. The roll out to customers started in Q3 2016.

 

Project Orion consists platform components/services that each have their own roll out plan and are currently being deployed to customers. Priority is based on customer need - Marketo’s Support Team is proactively monitoring customer instances for performance improvement opportunities related to Project Orion.

 

What's next for performance and scalability in 2017?

 

With our new big data architecture, we plan to continue building new platform services to further improve performance and scalability.

 

To learn more about what we have planned this year, come to the Marketing Nation Summit, April 23rd-26th.

 

Who can I contact for more information on Project Orion?

 

For more information on Project Orion, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager. If you’re experiencing specific scenarios where you feel that migrating to the new big data architecture will be beneficial, please have your authorized support contact open a case with our Support Team.