ZIWO Delivers Product Updates 50x Faster and Reduces Costs by 30% Using AWS

ZIWO’s contact center platform, called ZIWO Cloud Contact Center Software (CCaaS), was launched in 2016 and offers virtual phone numbers in more than 150 countries. Over the past 6 years, the company has grown significantly, establishing a presence across the entire Gulf region with its most recent launch in Egypt. Companies that use CCaaS can offer local contact numbers to customers in different countries, so those customers can contact support desks without paying extra call fees.The company provides regular code updates to give its customers access to the platform’s latest features. Previously, ZIWO could deliver code to only 10 customers at a time. As the company grew to serve around 450 businesses, it became increasingly difficult to satisfy all of its customers.

ZIWO wanted to scale its platform so it could deliver code to more of its customers at the same time and improve their overall experience. However, its CCaaS platform ran on a centralized virtual machine with a static amount of resources. This meant that it was difficult to scale and expensive to run, because the company paid for a high level of resources, even when usage was low. ZIWO also wanted to find a secure way to manage its customers’ credentials.

ZIWO migrated to AWS for its wide range of managed cloud services and reputation for reliability. Philippe Besse, head of infrastructure at ZIWO, decided to containerize CCaaS using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service, to run Kubernetes in the AWS cloud. For scalable compute services, CCaaS uses AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets it focus on building applications without managing servers. When Ziwo chooses to expand to a new territory, it uses AWS Local Zones, which are infrastructure deployments of compute, storage, database, and other select AWS services located close to large population centres.“When we started operating in Oman, we used the AWS Local Zone because it means that regardless of their location, our customers always have optimal low-latency access to our services,” says Besse.

ZIWO’s new infrastructure means it can now deploy product updates to more than 500 customers during one 40-minute time slot—that’s 50 times more than it previously could in a single time slot. “Now we can update all of our customers at the same time, they always have access to the latest features,” says Besse.

Using AWS for its infrastructure reduces the workload on ZIWO’s technical team, increasing their workflow by 75 percent. The migration has also helped ZIWO reduce its overall IT costs by 30 percent—using AWS Fargate and Amazon EKS means the company only pays for the compute resources that it uses.

Using AWS, ZIWO also improved the security of customer credentials and application programming interface (API) keys, which provide access between CCaaS and its customers’ CRM and business applications. Previously, these were stored in a legacy database whose provider no longer supported it.

ZIWO shut down its legacy database and now uses the Parameter Store in AWS Systems Manager, which allows the separation of sensitive resources and configuration data from code. “Our customers’ credentials are safeguarded, using AWS,” says Besse. “We now have confidence in our security and can audit access to any of the assets.”

ZIWO now runs 90 percent of its infrastructure on AWS and plans to migrate more workloads in the future. “We like using AWS because the interface is clear, there are a lot of services that allow us to build tools that improve our efficiency,” says Besse. “We look forward to further optimizing our costs and continuing to make our infrastructure simpler and more efficient, so we can provide the best possible experience for our customers.”