Vidyo: Improving performance and availability for real-time video

About Vidyo

Beyond video conferencing, Vidyo enriches people’s lives by embedding real-time video into virtually any application environment and network.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States

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By moving its VidyoCloud service to Google Cloud, Vidyo improved performance for real-time video, giving customers better experiences while reducing its hosting costs by 20 percent.

Google Cloud results

  • Improves video experiences for customers and their customers with fast compute and networking
  • Reduces cloud hosting costs by 20% and provides greater visibility into billing
  • Enables elasticity and global scalability, with new servers and data centers available in minutes versus months

Improved availability from 99.95% to 99.991%

Embedding real-time video into applications is becoming a necessity for many companies to improve customer communications, including technical support, customer service engagement, and video-assisted sales. Approximately 80 percent of product development professionals feel that embedded video is extremely or very important in engaging with their customers, according to a 2018 report conducted by Vidyo in partnership with BlogGeek.me, a specialist in WebRTC.

To easily incorporate video communications into any app, many companies are turning to vidyo.io, an API offering from Vidyo. Millions of people around the world connect visually every day through the VidyoCloud platform, a global, real-time video interaction platform designed for reliable and consistent performance even under challenging network conditions.

To achieve a high level of performance, it’s essential for Vidyo to optimize every part of the video delivery chain, including compute power, network latency, and server proximity to end users. It’s also critical to scale resources up and down to meet customers’ call demand while managing costs.

Until recently, Vidyo hosted its service on a co-located, hardware-based service that offered little elasticity. As demand for Vidyo’s products and services grew, network performance became insufficient. Adding compute resources was expensive, and a lack of visibility into billing made it difficult to control costs. If Vidyo needed to deploy into a new geographic region, it took three months for the vendor to stand up servers.

“We were trapped in a box, and we needed to get out,” says Tzachi Levy, SVP of Product Management at Vidyo. “So we started benchmarking performance on the major public clouds to determine which would be the best choice for our needs.”

“The performance we got out-of-the-box with Google Cloud was equivalent to the other cloud vendor plus a content delivery network, making Google Cloud the best cloud for real-time video. We were blown away.”

Tzachi Levy, SVP of Product Management, Vidyo

Vidyo has a long history of collaboration with Google to bring scalable video coding to the real-time communication, open source project WebRTC, so it was natural for the company to investigate Google Cloud to host the components that make up VidyoCloud. After benchmarking compute and network performance on Google Cloud against another major cloud vendor, Vidyo decided to perform a lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines to Google Cloud.

“The benchmarking we conducted between public clouds revealed that Google Cloud has a significant advantage, especially on network performance,” says Tzachi. “The performance we got out-of-the-box with Google Cloud was equivalent to the other cloud vendor plus a content delivery network, making Google Cloud the best cloud for real-time video. We were blown away.”

Better user experiences at a lower cost

Google Cloud gives Vidyo global reach, with access to over a dozen data centers on four continents. Designed to route video calls to the nearest data center for best performance, VidyoCloud leverages Cloud Load Balancing, which provides cross-region load balancing and automatic, multi-region failover to dramatically improve the end-user experience.

People connect to the Compute Engine instance nearest to their location through one of more than 100 Google Cloud peering points. If Vidyo needs to accommodate unforeseen peaks in customer call volume or deploy into a new geographic location to satisfy a customer’s request, cloud infrastructure is available in minutes.

With regional proximity and automatic redundancy, people experience a high-quality conversation regardless of their location. And because Vidyo can now scale elastically and host more concurrent calls per compute node, it’s reducing hosting costs, helping keep prices competitive and margins healthy.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we have happier customers, greater visibility into billing, and we’ve reduced our hosting costs by at least 20 percent,” says Tzachi. “Everyone at Google Cloud has been amazing, from our service rep to the solution engineers to the support teams.”

Keeping video conversations flowing

“Our customers’ audio/video experience fundamentally improved after Vidyo migrated to Google Cloud. Performance was significantly improved and communications flowed seamlessly.”

Marc Kirshbaum, CEO, Sococo

By offering enterprise-grade conversational video with low latency, Vidyo has become a business enabler to customers such as Sococo, an online office platform that provides a virtual workplace for distributed and remote teams. Naturally, audio and video are critical to a high-quality virtual workflow, and Sococo’s partnership with Vidyo brings real-time, HD-quality, face-to-face collaboration to the Sococo online office.

“Our customers’ audio/video experience fundamentally improved after Vidyo migrated to Google Cloud,” says Marc Kirshbaum, CEO of Sococo. “Performance was significantly improved and communications flowed seamlessly.”

Powering moments that matter

“We often deliver video to customers in telemedicine and financial services, where people are making important decisions based on their interactions. These are moments that matter, and Google Cloud is helping us deliver higher quality experiences.”

Cara Daly, Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Vidyo

With the migration to Google Cloud complete, availability for VidyoCloud has improved, increasing from 99.95 percent to 99.991 percent. In the near future, Vidyo plans to take advantage of managed services such as Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery to further modernize its infrastructure. It’s also looking into using Custom Machine Types and Preemptible VMs to improve performance and reduce costs even further.

“We often deliver video to customers in telemedicine and financial services, where people are making important decisions based on their interactions. Telemedicine is a particularly good example in which video makes a huge difference in people’s lives,” says Cara Daly, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Vidyo. “Virtual visits help providers ensure patient compliance, leading to better outcomes as well as reduced costs associated with readmissions. These are moments that matter, and Google Cloud is helping us deliver higher quality experiences.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Vidyo

Beyond video conferencing, Vidyo enriches people’s lives by embedding real-time video into virtually any application environment and network.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States