How Agora Drives Business Growth with AWS Marketplace

Focused on real-time engagement, Agora maintains stringent requirements for cloud infrastructure in terms of global availability, network performance, stability, and auto-scaling capabilities. For instance, during a massive live streaming event in North America this year that generated tremendous bandwidth demand, the AWS team completed emergency capacity expansion and secured bandwidth within days, reaffirming to Agora the rapid response and reliable support AWS delivers at business-critical moments.

This capability is a cornerstone of the partnership with AWS. Since 2015, the collaboration has evolved well beyond infrastructure, expanding into AI, content moderation, and initiatives to boost R&D efficiency. Today, Agora builds its overseas technology base on services such as Amazon EC2 for global node deployment and data management. For AI, Agora leverages AWS GPU instances to run voice model inference, achieving a 75% reduction in inference latency and a 4x performance improvement with support from the AWS team. Additionally, we have co-developed a real-time moderation solution for voice, image, and video streams, which has since evolved into a standardized product offering.

Along with the expansion of its global footprint, Agora integrated an expanding stack of third-party software tools covering databases, security protection, O&M, monitoring, and more. However, managing this proliferation of software tools exposed the limitations of traditional procurement model, creating operational bottlenecks for Agora's international growth.

Under the traditional model, each new software addition required onboarding a new vendor from scratch. From business negotiations and contract signing to invoice reconciliation and contract renewals, every step had to be managed separately with each vendor. As the number of onboarded vendors continued to rise, the management burden scaled exponentially. Inconsistent contract cycles, invoice formats, and payment terms across vendors created severe friction. Business teams were spread thin managing multiple vendor relationships, while the finance team struggled to process a variety of invoices and settlement rules, leading to a significant spike in workload for both departments. On top of that, language barriers and time zone differences inherent in cross-border operations meant that even a simple business confirmation or technical information check required multiple rounds of email, creating long communication chains and significantly reducing collaboration efficiency.

Confronted with practical pain points such as cumbersome management, complicated reconciliation, and inefficient cross-border communication caused by fragmented procurement, Agora needed a more unified software procurement model to centralize governance. Following a thorough evaluation, Agora turned to AWS Marketplace for third-party software sourcing, as its conversational agent capabilities drastically shortened transaction cycles for rapid procurement, while its centralized governance substantially boosted management efficiency.

With AWS Marketplace, Agora procured Couchbase as its core database, partnering with local AWS partner, Jinmu Information, for end-to-end implementation. As a local AWS Marketplace partner, Jinmu Information provided Agora with one-stop localized services throughout the implementation process, including sourcing, testing, deployment, and ongoing O&M:

• Seamless Communication: Eliminated language barriers and time zone differences, allowing issues to be resolved within the same day.
• Tailored Services: With deep insight into Agora's business scenarios, Jinmu Information delivered customized solutions, proactively provided product demos and performance test reports, and followed through with technical validation and performance optimization.
• Streamlined Processes: Jinmu Information assisted Agora in completing ordering, quotations, and contract alignment on AWS Marketplace, ensuring smooth procurement.

By combining Couchbase's robust database, Jinmu Information's localized technical and business services, and AWS's reliable platform and infrastructure, this "golden triangle" of collaboration effectively resolved Agora's challenges in third-party software procurement, management, and O&M.

Over the past three years, Agora has spent more than $1 million in software procurement across five ISVs through AWS Marketplace. Compared with traditional procurement models, AWS Marketplace has delivered substantial improvements in both efficiency and governance:

• Unified Software Governance & Enhanced IT Oversight: In the past, Agora had to track and manage contracts, orders, and renewals separately for different vendors. Now, with AWS Marketplace, third-party software products can be managed on a single platform, enabling centralized procurement governance that drives management efficiency while reducing shadow IT and resource waste.
• Optimizing IT Procurement Costs & Maximizing Cloud Budget Value: By drawing down third-party software costs against its AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) commitment, Agora has effectively optimized third-party software costs, which has generated deeper IT budget savings, improved resource utilization, and fully tapped the incremental potential of its cloud budget.
• Standardized Processes & Accelerated Procurement: Traditionally, negotiating contracts and navigating procurement processes with individual vendors resulted in lengthy cycles. Now, with the unified procurement catalog and allowlists of Private Marketplace on AWS Marketplace, the process is standardized, allowing procurements to be completed in just a few steps.
• Consolidated Billing & Effortless Reconciliation: Procuring through AWS Marketplace allows Agora to consolidate global spending into a single AWS invoice. This simplifies accounting and audit processes while removing the cross-border tax and invoicing hurdles typically associated with global software procurements.

Since adopting AWS Marketplace, the Agora team has established a consistent software sourcing workflow: whenever new third-party software is needed, they prioritize searching and intelligently comparing relevant products on AWS Marketplace, a shift that has completely reshaped their software procurement experience in the era of agentic AI.

Moving forward, Agora plans to expand its collaboration with AWS Marketplace, leveraging the platform to discover and procure new solutions that accelerate business innovation and growth.