Dedicated Server Case Study: Talkbox - China Voice IM Apps
Talkbox tapped into the China market with UDomain’s professionalism and enthusiasm
Background
Talkbox, a voice messaging mobile app designed by talents in Hong Kong, is popular across the globe. It has walked away with more than 50 industry awards in recognition of its product excellence. The app works like a walkie-talkie, allowing users to push to talk and get connected with family and friends everywhere and anywhere in the world.
Challenges
The fast-growing China market has long been a key battlefield for app developers who want to tap into its huge business potential. The global pioneer of voice messaging, Talkbox strives to make its way into the Mainland so as to get a piece of the action. Despite the fact that Talkbox is a strong product on the international stage, it does not find it any easier than other companies when it comes to running business in China. One of the major challenges is to work around the slow and unstable network connection there - this is particularly critical to Talkbox which involves cross-border voice messaging. Without ample server resources and bandwidth, it is impossible for Talkbox to live up to users’ expectations to deliver fast and smooth services.
Initially, Talkbox relied on the world’s biggest public cloud service provider to take care of its product assets and data. However, problems surfaced when it executed its China business plan: this service provider, despite its prominence in the international market, failed to deliver competent and speedy network services in China region! Talkbox had no choice but to figure out other alternatives, for instance, committing to the bandwidth services provided by Chinese local ISP companies. But in a second thought, this alternative was dropped from consideration. After all, Talkbox is a global business serving more than Chinese users. It is not wise for it to focus on the user experience of its Chinese users at the expense of users in other markets. In order to sustain its popularity and product penetration, it actually needs an all-round solution which can accommodate the huge data traffic from both China and the rest of the world. Eventually, Talkbox turned to UDomain, the leading IT service provider with around 20 years of experience in serving enterprises in Greater China. It expected to get effective solutions customised to its special business needs. The ultimate goal is to enhance its user experience in terms of speed and quality of connection.
Our Solutions
Comprehensive Tailored Solutions + China Mobile + UDomain’s Private Cloud Farm
The art of solving problems: first things first, avoid new problems
By the time Talkbox got in touch with us, its user base was growing at a substantial rate. Every day, there were 1 million new users subscribing to its services. In our experience assisting thousands of companies to enter into China market, Talkbox with such a gigantic user base had to be extremely cautious when taking even the smallest action because a small leak can sink a great ship. A market leader renowned for our professional services and proactive work approach, we say no to any short-term solutions which fail to get to the core of problems. Rather, we are dedicated to offering comprehensive solutions tailored to the business objectives, IT infrastructure and resources of individual clients. In the case of Talkbox, our key consideration was to come up with a user- and client-friendly plan. On one hand, users in all regions should be able to enjoy Talkbox services as normal when the network upgrade is being performed. On the other hand, the upgrade should be easy to implement while the source codes of the app should remain unchanged. This is to ensure that client would be free from additional workloads. Overall, the idea was to avoid bringing new problems to users and client or any potential negative impacts to the business operations of Talkbox – this essentially was the prerequisite to achieving the core goal of enhancing the network speed and user experience of the app.
The recipe for success: teaming up with the best
Partnering up with a reliable local partner is one of the best strategies for succeeding in China market. China Mobile is unquestionably the most promising partner given its track record in delivering seamless and fast ISP services to local users. China Mobile welcomed the partnership idea from UDomain, taking into account that we are amongst the best of network service providers in Greater China region. Being a partner of the top ISP in China enables us to gain a significant competitive edge over other network service providers in offering China-related services. As soon as the partnership deal was finalised, we immediately started to build solutions for Talkbox using our own cloud farm which costs us 0.8 million dollars.
The means to high-speed network connectivity: UDomain’s private cloud farm
A cloud farm works in a way similar to that of the hybrid data storage pool architecture adopted by many big enterprises. The latter automatically segments data according to their frequencies of being accessed, and subsequently assigns them to the appropriate storage devices. For example, the most frequently accessed data are stored in flash storage while the less used data sit in SAS. A cloud farm resembles this segmentation concept. There are different ISP lines in our cloud farm, including the ones from our partner, China Mobile. Those traffic coming from China IPs will be routed to the lines of China Mobile while the other foreign traffic will go to the bandwidth dedicated to them. By doing this, the overall connection speed can be greatly enhanced. Our advanced cloud farm has already been built and is in service, allowing our clients to enjoy the benefits of this new data management technology anytime, anywhere. In other words, Talkbox is able to instantly take advantage of cloud farm architecture without investing money in the required fixed assets out of its own pocket.'
Key Takeaways
As always, we gave our very best in communicating with Talkbox, analysing the problems it faced, customising solutions and executing the technical details without affecting the normal Talkbox services. Eventually, the overall connection speed and user experience were significantly improved, providing a solid ground for Talkbox to develop its operations in China. Talkbox remarked that UDomain is no ordinary network service provider. This is the first time it came across a vendor who did not mind spending extra manpower to fully understand its business needs, deeply get involved in its business planning and proactively suggest ways of optimising its product and the overall IT infrastructure, thus ironing out many of its underlying business issues. UDomain has completely broken through the stereotype of network service providers being short-sighted and calculating, instilling much confidence in enterprises in quest of quality network services. Taking the initiative to partner with China Mobile is one of the examples illustrating how professional and strategic UDomain is. And this partnership has also granted us the competitive advantage in providing China-related services. Overall speaking, UDomain has achieved what competitors are unwilling or incapable of doing. It is our professionalism and enthusiasm that leaves Talkbox highly impressed and satisfied.
