An organization that is lacking scalability often finds their teams overwhelmed and ill-prepared for expansion. But what happens when the market demands rapid growth? Especially for organizations with growing technical capabilities, there is a heightened need for agility and scalability due to increasing market demand. Scaling an organization can be complicated, time-intensive, and expensive. Yet, with cloud-first strategies, organizations are enabled with the agility and scalability necessary to grow and even reduce time-to-market. According to McKinsey, companies that have adopted cloud platforms bring new capabilities to market about 20 to 40% faster. So, implementing a cloud-first strategy to improve scalability is a no-brainer at this point.
The Prime Holding team had the pleasure of working with Jigsaw, a research-based cooperative learning technique, to improve stability and scalability throughout their organization with a cloud-first approach. Come along with us as we dive into just how our team helped Jigsaw scale their Patented Platform for Virtual Collaboration and Training.
The Problem: Scaling Their Solution
Jigsaw Interactive is an online service that provides a virtual conferencing platform used by large organizations and online education platforms to host training sessions and conference calls. The company's biggest problem was their inability to expand the business due to reaching the limits of their product's current implementation and setup on a single AWS EC2 instance. Jigsaw had to take a new direction to rework and scale their own solution to adequately meet the needs of their customers and allow it within 3 months to support 6x more users than they were able to handle at the time. Additionally, due to the company’s rapid growth, Jigsaw needed to develop a solution to support 170x more active users in the following two years.
After multiple meetings discussing the best course of action to take, our team and the Jigsaw team partnered up to determine the major challenges we had to solve for:
- Building upon their team of experts in the field of virtual learning
- Preparing the application for cloud deployment
- Introducing a CI/CD pipeline
- Introducing a docker-compose based development environment
- Tackling scalability and load balancing of media server and recording services
The Prime Holding Solution
First, Prime started by scaling up its development team that was already working with Jigsaw. Due to Prime’s ability to tap into a large pool of experts, they were able to bring to the project professionals with extensive skills and technological knowledge, which were much needed for the challenge. Their project management team has successfully created separate, highly efficient, self-organized cross-functional development teams.
To begin, the Prime Holding team enabled the Jigsaw software to auto-scale with every user online and dynamically allocate AWS instances as needed, allowing it to support more than 15,000 active participants simultaneously. The development team built a completely new cloud-based infrastructure using Kubernetes on top of AWS services. In order to take advantage of the new infrastructure and achieve the highest level of scalability, our team introduced a microservices architecture that was used to rebuild most of the services. As for the product delivery process, the DevOps team automated and secured the process by implementing full-scale CI/CD utilizing Concourse CI. As a result, Jigsaw is now able to deliver a highly scalable solution that can dynamically allocate AWS instances as needed and support thousands of online users.
Results of the Cloud-First Strategy Implementation
The Jigsaw team — now double the size with the help of Prime Holding — upgraded the Jigsaw platform in just 3 months, enabling cross-version direct web communication at scale. Due to this massive improvement in scalability, Jigsaw increased its revenue and won a significant number of new customers. In doing so, Jigsaw became one of the 50 Most Admired Companies by The Silicon Review. Additionally, the Prime Holding team helped the company rapidly scale up their product and business while helping:
- Build a brilliant team of 40+ experts in the field of e-learning
- Scale the solution to support thousands of users online
- Create a cloud-based distributed microservices architecture
- Automate and secure the production process
Today, Prime Holding is responsible for Jigsaw’s entire in-house organization, management, and execution of the development process, as well as for PM, QA, and Support. Together with Jigsaw, Prime Holding also leads the product management and planning teams.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, by integrating our team of experts with the Jigsaw team, we improved the company’s scalability and overall operations. In any organization, cloud-first strategies boost agility and scalability, enabling R&D teams to rapidly deliver products to meet customer expectations and market demands. So it’s no surprise that the compound annual growth rate for cloud services from now until 2025 is projected to be 24.74%! If you’re looking for a solution to scale your organization’s operations, the time to implement cloud-first strategies is now.
Get in touch with our experts to learn more about how Prime Holding can help scale your organization.
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