Ramping up engineer hiring and bringing technology in-house (2006)

Owning technology bred the next business

The meaning of this decision goes beyond immediate server reinforcement. For an ad agency — a sales-led company — to hire engineers itself and entrust the design and operation of its infrastructure to a technology chief was a decision to shift the centre of the company’s capabilities from sales to technology. As symbolised by a design that used MySQL and Oracle for different purposes, bringing things in-house was not merely securing manpower but creating a state in which it could optimise its own services with its own technology. Having decided to own media, it had to own the technology to support it too — the 2004 Ameba choice inevitably summoned this in-housing.

And the technological strength grown in this period did not stop at Ameba alone. An organisation able to design and run large-scale services in-house later became the parent body sending people and know-how into fields where technology decides competitiveness — the Cygames games business, and the ad-tech unit handling ad-delivery technology. The starting point at which CyberAgent, begun as a sales company, came to be recognised as a place for engineers to work also lies in this 2006 turn. Entry into media prompted the in-housing of technology, and that technology in turn bred the next business — the first link of this chain was tied here.