Seewo Technology expands a new educational model with Azure

Founded in 2008, Guangzhou Shirui Electronics Co.,Ltd belongs to CVTE, a world-renowned intelligent interactive solution provider with display and control technology at its core. The company’s headquarters are in Guangzhou Science City, China, with marketing services all over the world. Seewo is the independent brand of Seewo Technology in the field of education. Created in 2009, it’s the pioneer in the domestic interactive smart tablet category. The company has been the market share champion of China’s interactive intelligent tablet industry for 10 consecutive years from 2012 to 2021 and is the industry benchmark enterprise.

At present, more than 60 percent of the company’s staff members are technical R&D personnel. The company owns an independent R&D system, focusing on the application of human-computer interaction intelligence, project research, and product development around touch technology, LCD drivers, board design, system integration, software development, industrial design, and product services involving AI, the internet, intelligent Internet of Things (IOT), and other fields.

Customer pain points

As a company with a worldwide presence, Seewo strives to serve its global customers with localized products. The company has launched a range of its own educational software products for the Chinese market, which when combined with its own hardware such as tablets, can provide a first-class experience for Chinese teachers, students, and parents. To maximize the value for markets abroad, Seewo sought to cooperate more closely with overseas business partners and integrate its self-developed software and hardware platform with the mainstream online collaboration platforms of the education industry in different countries and regions.

At the same time, Seewo also encountered significant challenges in terms of compliance. As a company with a global presence in more than 200 countries and a focus on the education industry, Seewo takes the protection of customer data privacy and compliance with global infrastructure and services very seriously. Consequently, the company needed to choose a reliable partner to grow with.

Solutions

After considering a number of providers and platforms, Seewo chose Microsoft as having the strong technical capabilities it was looking for, both in terms of products and marketing, and decided to migrate its overseas infrastructure to Microsoft Azure. To help make the transition as seamless as possible, Microsoft actively supported the migration through the Azure Migration and Modernization Program. This involved not only an investment in Microsoft engineers to select products and develop the best path for the migration, but also in financial support for professional partners to support the migration.

With the help of Microsoft experts and partners, Seewo used the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure methodology during the migration process to properly plan the overall migration. This process included planning for phases and tasks for each phase, prioritizing the construction of an Azure landing zone, correctly designing modules for resource categorization, authentication, networking, monitoring, and security in the landing zone, and successfully migrating all applications in batches in a step-by-step manner through module expansion. Subsequently, Seewo also built a new overseas infrastructure based on Microsoft datacenters in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe, enabling highly secure, stable, reliable, and compliant operations and helping reduce costs and increase efficiency through advanced applications such as Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Database for MySQL, and Azure Cosmos DB.

In particular, the adoption of Linux on Azure provides a great convenience for Seewo. Azure has extensive support for open-source technologies, including Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and CoreOS. Almost all major Linux distributions run seamlessly on the Azure platform and are supported by Azure monitoring and management services for self-service operation and maintenance. Additionally, Azure services support a wide range of programming languages, open-source tools, and technology stacks, giving Seewo the flexibility to choose the technology it specializes in and deploy it quickly to a given region. At the same time, the company can further reduce usage costs with benefits such as Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances.

Both Microsoft and Seewo have also carried out in-depth collaboration in education scenarios to jointly expand a new educational ecology model. BytelloClass Activity, a Seewo educational application, is now integrated with the Office 365 platform and is available in the Microsoft Teams app marketplace; users can utilize Seewo education products within Teams with their Office 365 accounts for a smooth and convenient experience.

Figure 1. System architecture for Seewo’s migration to Azure

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Customer benefits

Seewo received the following benefits from its collaboration with Microsoft:

The ability to rapidly build flexible, innovative business platforms. With the global reach of the Azure platform and the help of Microsoft technicians, Seewo has been able to expand its business across Asia, Europe, and the Americas in a very short period. And with the Azure platform’s rich services and first-class support for various open source technologies, especially Linux, it has been able to quickly build products and services to meet the needs of customers in different regions. The support of Microsoft engineers and the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure methodology further accelerated Seewo’s migration to the cloud.
Operating in compliance and focusing more on the business itself. Seewo’s business inevitably involves handling a large amount of data relating to individuals, especially underage students, and many regions have strict and onerous compliance requirements to meet. Azure offers a rich set of compliance controls and features, and it has received numerous compliance certifications from different regions and industries around the world. Azure helps Seewo solve most compliance-related challenges, allowing it to focus on its tasks and the expansion of its business.
Taking advantage of the Microsoft ecosystem to reach more potential users. By integrating with Office 365 and making it available on the Teams app marketplace, Seewo’s education apps are more widely available in overseas education markets. This not only further simplifies the process for potential customers, but also makes it easier for them to use Seewo’s services on a platform they’re already familiar with.

Find out more about Guangzhou Shirui Electronics Co.,Ltd