Easymeeting Case Study

Background

Easymeeting was established as a business unit within Avikom in 2006, with the idea to develop services for the video conferencing market. Easymeeting was subsequently developed as a highly scalable platform for delivering cloud services for the global video conferencing market also known as VCaaS and VaaS.

At first, we hired service people to manually help connect different endpoints via bridges that were stored in the back of the office. We then saw the need for an admin system to keep track of the different meetings. However, we could not afford to buy the expensive system available in the market, and at that time, these systems were not able to handle a large number of endpoints.

From this point, Easymeeting developed its own super scalable platform for next-generation video meetings, independent of what technology the user chooses. The platform is a pure business development platform, whereas Easymeeting can present new disruptive services to a global market. Our goal is to make a video meeting easier than a phone call.

Today Easymeeting has its head office in Norway and in Connecticut (US). Beginning in 2017, Easymeeting is establishing offices in China. Our mission is to enhance everyone’s conversations by delivering the easiest and friendliest video communication solution in the world.

Challenges

Easymeeting has been growing and developing our service platform on several co-locations and other cloud service providers. We were looking for a global provider that could help us optimize cost.

We have been very satisfied with other providers and did not think about replacing anything when we got in touch with Alibaba Cloud. We, however, felt the connection and the relationship to Alibaba Cloud could grow way better than with others where we always only would be one of a million customers and we liked the advantage of getting closer to our provider which we could with Alibaba Cloud.

Why Alibaba Cloud

You are always concerned when you team up with new partners, but we have experience working with Chinese tech companies and we know they deliver more than expected. We have seen in the implementation stage that any such concerns were not relevant.

The key point that moved us towards was Alibaba Cloud`s vision: More than just cloud. The future rich and innovative offerings and the feeling that we'd be apart of an extensive ecosystem made the decision easy for us.

Easymeeting decided to use Alibaba Cloud after a recommendation from one of our partners. The running costs in Alibaba Cloud are better than the competitors. And most importantly; Alibaba Cloud have co-locations all over the globe, making it easy for us to deploy our global video infrastructure.

Results

When we started to install our platform on Alibaba Cloud, we were surprised how easy and how effective each stage of the process was. Everything from tech setup to payment options was done in no time.

We feel Alibaba Cloud fits us very well both because of the pricing and not least the coverage all over the globe, which is very nice for us when running video conferencing services where delay and latency plays a big role.

Our deployment will grow as we move forward and the short-term plan is to set up conferencing nodes in Asia, in the EU and in the USA, together with call managers, proxies and policy servers. We have in the last few years gained some experience from Amazon cloud services and feel Alibaba Cloud are as close to this as you get. The admin works well and I think we’ll be able to deploy everything we now host in other places.

Architecture

The Alibaba Cloud product we use is Elastic Compute Service (ECS), and we are looking into several other services like their options for scaling, redundancy, and monitoring.

Final Word

We advise other companies to just test it out before they choose other alternatives.

Raymond Sebergsen, Easymeeting Product Manager