Amazon Web Services > Case Studies > Hiiir Inc.: Scaling Digital Media Services with IoT

Hiiir Inc.: Scaling Digital Media Services with IoT

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

E-Commerce
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Procurement
Sales & Marketing

Use Cases

Construction Management
Infrastructure Inspection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Hiiir Inc., founded in 2008, is Taiwan’s leading digital media company providing digital marketing consulting services, application development, and e-commerce services. The company has developed several applications such as a cuisine and travel app with location-based service features—Alley App—and Timemart—a content curation app. In June 2013, Hiiir attracted major investment from leading telecommunications company FarEasTone and developed an e-commerce service launched in 2014—friDay and friDay Shopping. Today, Hiiir has more than 300 employees working on its portfolio of services and is constantly expanding its business to meet the needs of its users.

The Challenge

Hiiir Inc., a leading digital media company in Taiwan, faced significant IT challenges due to rapid growth in demand for its mobile marketing services. The company's on-premises solution was unable to keep up with the need for quick scalability. The procurement cycles for on-premises infrastructure were lengthy, reducing the company's agility and complicating budgeting as IT had to project its spend many months in advance. Furthermore, Hiiir lacked the necessary facilities to house a large datacenter and did not have enough IT staff to ensure optimal performance. The company needed a solution that would allow them to scale their computing capacity as needed to support their services, a requirement that could not be met with an on-premises solution.

The Solution

Hiiir turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a cloud-based IT solution. AWS offered an end-to-end service providing everything Hiiir needed for a cloud-based data center. The company had faith in the stability of the AWS platform, which was crucial as their services needed to be constantly available. Hiiir successfully deployed AWS using its own internal resources, leveraging multiple Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to support its apps and solutions. They also used Amazon Route 53 for DNS services, Amazon CloudFront for content distribution, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon ElastiCache for in-memory caching, Elastic Load Balancing for distributing incoming traffic, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage.

Operational Impact

By using AWS, Hiiir has been able to avoid concerns over lengthy procurement cycles, managing a large datacenter, or the need for a large number of IT staff to manage such an infrastructure. The company can now scale its AWS infrastructure on demand, eliminating the need to plan procurement months in advance and simplifying budgeting processes. The company has moved all of its core services, including Alley App, AAMiner, friDay Play, and friDay Shopping to AWS. Looking ahead, Hiiir plans to extend the value of its investment in AWS through new services, continuing to drive rapid growth.

Quantitative Benefit

Hiiir can now scale its IT infrastructure significantly quicker with AWS.
The company can test and deploy its IT infrastructure at least 40 percent faster by using AWS versus an on-premises infrastructure.
Hiiir has made significant savings in terms of IT labor costs, lowering IT administration costs by 80 percent.