The World Cup saw a number of surges in mobile engagement as increasingly-connected football fans took to their smartphones and tablets to discuss the drama and excitement of the tournament. For customer engagement company Urban Airship, that meant increaasing its peak messaging throughput to set new internal records.

The firm was able to boost its messaging throughput by 33 per cent, with traffic spiking during the conclusion of the World Cup final to 400,000 notifications per second, a level it maintained for almost seven minutes.

The improvements in message speed and delivery were driven by migrating its real-time messaging infrastructure from co-located bare-metal to the Google Cloud Platform. Urban Airship is looking to build on these gains with the general availability of Boost, a new service the dramatically acclerates the delivery of push notificaitons, even at massive global scale.

Boost was used by design partner and customer Onefootball during the World Cup to connect with the more than 35m global season active users that form the worlds largest and fastest-growing digital platform for football fans.

“Onefootballs audience has dramatically increased over the last two World Cups and 85 per cent of users opt in to receive notifications, so a scalable real-time messaging platform is a core requirement,” said Lucas Von Cranach, founder and CEO of Onefootball. “Weve had a very good collaboration with Urban Airship for the past two years, and now Boost has improved the reliability and speed of our notifications.

“Speed is critical as theres no customer more passionate than a sports fan. Messages arriving seconds sooner make all the difference to their experience and the value of our platform. Notification are one of our key drivers for app openings. We used Urban Airships in-app automation engine to instantly reach app users in precise in-session moments to drive greater engagement.”

Urban Airship Boost includes a software optimisation service running on top of Google Cloud, which includes multi-dimensional message speed reporting and direct access to the Urban Airship engineering team for performance consulting. This guarantees that all customers can ensure their message delivery infrastructure ranks among the worlds best.

“Since the London Olympics, Urban Airship has delivered major world news on a bybrid architecture combining cloud platforms and bare-metal infrastructure,” said Mike Herrick, senior vice presidnet of product and engineering at Urban Airship. “Now, with Google Cloud Platform, weve been able to increase platform reliability, cut production incidents in half, and deliver unprecedented perofrmance at incredible global scale – all while dedicating resources to industry-leading innovations like the Boost serice we are unveiling today. Our data shows 98 per cent of Onefootball users received notifications in under 30 seconds.”