Optoma Facilitates Virtual Collaboration with Hybrid Learning Platform on AWS

Stiff competition and long innovation cycles have led many equipment manufacturers to start developing more integrated solutions. Successful manufacturers are using their application and process expertise to create holistic hardware-plus-software solutions tailored to their customers’ needs. This approach has proven sustainable and profitable. Manufacturers that are further ahead in this transformation cycle delivered higher total shareholder returns over the past three years than peers that are just beginning to offer integrated solutions.

Optoma is a leading provider of large format display solutions for large-venue installations, businesses, educators, and consumers. Since establishing its brand in 2000, the company has aspired to captivate, inspire, and help its customers connect via its comprehensive display offerings, from award-winning projectors to interactive flat panels and direct-view indoor LED displays. In 2016, Optoma began building proprietary software solutions to facilitate presentations, collaboration, and communication for remote and hybrid work environments. 

Until its pivot to software-driven innovation, Optoma relied on on-premises infrastructure for its IT requirements. However, when its software team was formed, the company turned to cloud computing for faster software development. Optoma had been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its website and chose AWS as its application development platform.

Tarcy Y.M. Tsuei, chief digital officer at Optoma, says, “We knew AWS would provide us with the flexibility to scale dynamically based on actual usage during development and production.” Optoma’s core values include reliability, innovation, and customer focus, and the AWS Cloud supports all three of these elements. Tsuei says, “Using AWS as a platform as a service has helped us provide a more reliable, stable, and secure service offering compared to managing these aspects on our own. We can focus on business logic and trust AWS for the rest.”  

In 2017, Optoma introduced Internet of Things (IoT) technology to enable the remote management of its devices. It first launched the Optoma Connect app for consumers to control projectors in the home. Optoma Connect uses the MQTT IoT messaging protocol running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, and it relies on Amazon Alexa to enable voice-activated commands.

The company recently launched the Creative Board hybrid learning platform, its latest foray into IoT innovation. Creative Board allows users to simultaneously work or learn on Optoma’s interactive panel displays by providing a connected whiteboard with embedded annotation tools. Teachers, students, and corporate employees can use their computer or smartphone browsers to participate in classes or collaborate in brainstorming sessions.

Optoma built Creative Board using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for MariaDB with multi-AZ architecture to ensure service availability for its global customers. It uses Amazon CloudFront for low-latency data transmission, which is essential to support the real-time interaction component of Creative Board. It also employs Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to power real-time applications with sub-millisecond latency.

Additionally, Optoma leverages Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for data storage and retrieval. “Amazon S3 has 99.999999999 percent data durability, which reduces our risk of service interruption by providing high stability to our customers,” Tsuei says. Optoma recently concluded a technical review of its Creative Board build with the AWS team, learning from and applying the principles of the AWS Well-Architected tool. “AWS helped evaluate our architecture design to make sure our service is robust enough to meet the real-time demands of educators and students around the world,” adds Tsuei.

Optoma launched Creative Board 56 percent faster on the AWS Cloud compared to previous application launches on premises. Its engineers can create development infrastructure in as little as one week, whereas the on-premises infrastructure procurement cycle could take three months.

In addition to speed of iteration and development, Optoma has found building on the AWS Cloud more cost-efficient. “We estimate a 36 percent cost savings by adopting AWS services because we are saving on the purchase of hardware and software licenses,” Tsuei says. Previously, Optoma would buy and renew licenses for security software, for example, as part of its application stack. On AWS, however, the company benefits from security by design, a foundational concept behind every AWS service.

Optoma’s application engineering team is focusing on enhancing Creative Board and collecting user feedback to improve the product. Next, it will evaluate how artificial intelligence (AI) can be applied for further innovation in Creative Board or other education technology applications. “We’re considering how to help teachers determine how effective a class was by measuring participation rates or interaction with the board,” explains Tsuei. “Or how AI could improve students’ concentration and ability to absorb the information shared on Creative Board.”

Another division within Optoma, the internal IT team, is also taking advantage of the AWS Cloud and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to develop a market intelligence platform. The platform will collect data from internal sales and external sources such as social media to stay aligned with sentiment and developments in Optoma’s target markets.

Tsuei concludes, “AWS continues to support our teams and innovation mindset to bring new and reliable products to market faster.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/solutions/iot.