Imagination Creates the Future of Brand Experiences with Opscode

- Deploys Opscode Hosted Chef™ to Deliver One-of-a-Kind Events and Installations for World's Leading Brands, Accelerating Time-to-Market for New Projects from Days to Hours

LONDON, Oct. 4, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- From Velocity Europe, Opscode®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Imagination, one of the world's leading creative agencies for companies including Canon, Ford, Jaguar Land Rover, Shell and many more, has deployed Opscode Hosted Chef™ to automate everything from configuration management to application delivery across both its Amazon EC2 cloud and physical data center resources.

Imagination is a dynamic creative agency providing a broad spectrum of services encompassing everything from traditional advertising and PR, to digital, multi-platform marketing programs, live events, and interactive brand experiences. To deliver these services to the world's biggest brands, Imagination leverages a hybrid infrastructure combining Amazon EC2 resources with physical servers to ensure maximum agility and efficiency in its development and production processes.

"Our business depends on our ability to create and recreate application-intensive, multi-media brand experiences in very little time," said Kel Phillipson, Head of Technology, Imagination. "Hosted Chef is a model of reuse that allows us to roll-out sophisticated infrastructure in hours and recreate data-intensive projects in minutes, giving our business the agility to innovate ahead of the curve."

"Imagination is redefining creative communications by delivering one-of-a-kind interactive events and immersive digital media experiences that eliminate the boundaries between brands and consumers," said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. "Using Hosted Chef to propel an agile approach to development speeds time-to-market, enabling Imagination to not only finish client projects in less time, but take on more new business, as well."

Using Hosted Chef, Imagination has been able to establish a model of reuse across its entire live experience and digital media development pipeline, speeding the delivery of new installations and applications, while reducing resource management from days to minutes.

Customer Benefits:

• Accelerated Time-to-Market: Hosted Chef enables Imagination to recreate sophisticated infrastructure and data-intensive digital platforms with a few simple lines of code. Now, Imagination can deliver live experiences and digital projects in hours instead of days, significantly accelerating time-to-market.
• Maximum Consistency: With Hosted Chef, Imagination's Technology team has automated everything from server configuration to application delivery across its cloud and physical infrastructure, eliminating nearly all manual management tasks. Now Imagination's small DevOps team can focus on higher order priorities, while Hosted Chef ensures resources are always configured to exact and repeatable specifications.
• Adapt to Change: When the on-site networking configuration at the 2012 Detroit Auto Show forced Imagination to recreate numerous servers supporting its live brand experience for Ford, Hosted Chef enabled its operations team to do so in a single afternoon, instead of days, without any interruption to the installation. Hosted Chef provides Imagination with the agility to adapt to change on the fly without impacting services, ensuring maximum flexibility to facilitate client and live event changes.

About Imagination
Launched in London in 1978, Imagination is an independent creative agency whose roots lie in non-traditional, live, experience marketing. Imagination has sixteen offices around the world, and the full complement of in-house talent, from brand consultants to architects, advertising specialists to interior designers, retail specialists and event producers to investor communications and digital experts. This unique offering enables Imagination to approach every problem from broader and more surprising angles, build solutions from the ground up across all channels, and deliver insights aligned with the way people wish to interact with brands. Imagination transforms business through creativity.  In 2012, Imagination was named one of The Sunday Times' International Track 200 companies recognising the agency's international growth. Imagination's past and current clients include ASICS, Aston Martin, BT, Canon, Ford, Guinness, Harrods, Jaguar Land Rover, John Lewis, oneworld global alliance, Shell, Samsung and Prada.

For more information please visit: www.imagination.com

About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

Press Contact:
Lucas Welch
lucas@opscode.com
+1-206-745-0000