Axinom Cuts Costs by 70%, Enables Global Expansion by Migrating to AWS

Axinom provides leading digital solutions to the media and entertainment industry such as Axinom Content Management System (CMS), which manages and prepares multimedia content to be streamed by millions of users at home or on airplanes, trains, and buses. The company also offers Axinom DRM, a leading Digital Rights Management solution. The digital products are used by many of the largest media and aerospace organizations across the globe.

For years, Axinom ran its Windows-based applications in an on-premises environment that made it difficult to scale to meet increasing user traffic. “We wanted to expand our services globally, but we couldn’t do it without incurring huge cost and effort,” says Johannes Jauch, chief technology officer at Axinom. Although the company moved its environment to a cloud technology provider, it still needed to increase scalability and drive down costs. “Our job scheduler was not provisioning virtual machines optimally,” says Jauch. “It didn’t consider the actual cost of running machines.”

Axinom chose to migrate its application environment to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for better scalability and flexibility. “We were looking for a solution that would also fit our future needs as we move toward an OS-agnostic approach,” says Jauch.

Axinom moved its applications, including Axinom CMS and Axinom DRM, to the AWS Cloud. The company now runs its Microsoft SQL Server–based platform on hundreds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances. To further reduce costs, the company also began taking advantage of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, spare compute capacity available at discounted prices compared to On-Demand Instances. More recently, Axinom integrated its DRM service with the AWS Elemental MediaLive and MediaPackage video processing services. The integration gives Axinom customers the ability to process and package video content into different formats to reduce the need for multiple content packagers.

By relying on the global presence of AWS, with 21 geographic regions and 66 Availability Zones, Axinom can easily expand its application platform to reach more users throughout the world. “We have grown our multimedia management solution because of the easy scalability of AWS,” Jauch says. “We would not have been able to grow as quickly as we have without the AWS Cloud.”

Axinom has also cut its operational costs by taking advantage of Amazon EC2 Spot Instances. “We have cut costs for supporting our digital media supply chain services by 70 percent using AWS products such as Amazon EC2 Spot Instances,” says Jauch. “As a result, we can provide more competitive pricing for our global customers. This helps us to be more competitive in the industry, as we continue developing this application further.”

The organization has also reduced time-to-market on AWS. “After we migrated to AWS, our development got much faster for our multimedia management solutions because we don’t have to spend time on ongoing maintenance work for aging environments,” says Jauch. “We freed many development resources, so we have more people actually creating and implementing new software features for our customers now.”

The move to AWS has also given Axinom the technical support and capability it needed for its Windows workloads. “All our products were originally developed on Microsoft .NET and we still use SQL Server for our databases. We are interested in exploring the open source Linux and managed database services like Amazon RDS, and choice of open source databases, such as Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and MySQL,” says Jauch. “It is crucial that we have the right support in the cloud for these workloads, and we are getting that with AWS.”

Soon, Axinom plans to use more AWS services in building innovative new application features and services. “We are currently looking at building solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and we know AWS has the right technology to enable that,” says Jauch. “AWS services support our growth strategy, and we are excited to continue our cloud journey together.”