Lamar Advertising Increases Productivity and Maintains Competitive Edge with Rubrik

Overview

Headquartered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lamar Advertising is one of the largest outdoor advertising companies in the world and has over 348,000 displays across the United States and Canada. In addition to its more traditional out of home inventory, Lamar is proud to offer its customers the largest network of digital billboards in the United States.

Peter Dunn, Director of Infrastructure, is focused on fostering innovation across the organization while working to provide reliable, accessible infrastructure for 4,000 employees. “With something as critical as IT, any roadblocks can bottleneck larger projects, which is why it’s essential to adopt cost-effective tools that optimize for efficiency,” said Dunn. "Rubrik protects everything that makes our business run, from pipeline management tools to the systems that power our digital billboards themselves. We need to have the utmost confidence in the infrastructure we build.”

“As innovation continues to permeate the IT space, it’s increasingly important to be intentional about the tools we leverage,” said Dunn. “As a manager, I know that bringing in tools that encourage economical use of my team’s time is critical to maintaining low turnover and supporting job satisfaction. Adopting transformative technologies like Rubrik allows my employees to spend more time on interesting, value-added work that propels the whole business forward.”

Solutions

Gaining a competitive edge with next-gen data management

As market leaders in the digital billboard space, Lamar leverages their IT organization to both maintain their standing and capitalize on new opportunities to differentiate. “We’re displaying unique images every 6-8 seconds across thousands of billboards across the nation, and it takes a lot of technical horsepower on the backend to ensure that things are running the way they should be,” said Dunn. “Our infrastructure needs to be flexible in order to support the growth necessary to undertake these projects that help give us a competitive edge.”

Prior to Rubrik, inelastic IT capabilities limited where Lamar could expand. “Once we reached 700 digital billboard locations, we really hit a brick wall,” said Dunn. “The business is always chomping at the bit to keep growing, but we simply didn’t have the elastic infrastructure in place to accommodate the customers and advertisers we were reaching. Technologies like Rubrik allow us to scale infinitely; I think of it as future-proofing. With Rubrik, we’re able to quickly adapt to the needs of the business and approach opportunities confident that we have the capacity to expand our operations.”

Lamar uses Rubrik to protect their 100% virtualized environment, including SQL databases and mission-critical applications.