Founded in 2004, Advent Group provides business and higher education matching services globally. Based in Europe, Canada and the US, the company aims to connect universities and other educational institutions with future students from across the globe through hundreds of virtual and in-person events. Advent Group is the proud organizer of Access MBA, Access Masters, and Premier EMBA tours, to name a few, that attract attendees ranging from school directors and corporate executives to prospective students.
The challenge
The company’s main conferencing platform, Advent Connect, facilitates communication between stakeholders in the higher education space. There are three types of virtual events hosted on the PHP-based platform: group meetings, webinars led by dedicated speakers, and one-on-one meetings that run in parallel as part of larger online conferences. In addition, the web application runs with the help of integrations with popular third-party services like Zoom and Jitsi.
The number of meetings held over Advent Connect grew significantly over the past few years, reaching several hundred events in 2020. As the usage increased, so did the number of users experiencing issues with connection speed and audio and video quality. The system’s performance had to be stabilized and improved to allow for the hassle-free access of an ever global audience. First things first, Advent Group’s management had to understand the underlying problems. So they asked ITIDO to check what was going on under the hood.
Our advisory role
To understand Advent Connect’s condition properly, ITIDO assembled a multifaceted project team of experienced software engineers and system architects. They performed a technical review (audit) in two consecutive phases. The first was dedicated mainly to source code and database review while the second dealt with the architecture and the state of the virtual and physical servers Advent Connect relies on.
As a result of the first phase, ITIDO found that existing database connections had to be fixed and some source code refactoring had to be performed. То support increasing traffic and global coverage, the second phase focused on infrastructural review. At the end of it, ITIDO proposed network design improvements, cost-effective hardware upgrades as well as the implementation of a smart, on-demand solution for regional virtual machines powered by one of the popular providers of cloud computing services.
As a sign of establishing a long-term partnership, ITIDO is looking forward to helping Advent Group in the implementation of these recommendations and, furthermore, in executing together more and more exciting software projects.
Testimonial / Quote:
“We are very impressed by the approach and the level of professionalism that the team of ITIDO demonstrated during the whole project. It wasn’t an easy task in my opinion – the business logic of Advent Connect is quite specific, and the code and architecture were chaotic enough due to the very fast development process and rapidly changing business requirements. They managed to cope with all the challenges and proposed workable solutions. At the same time their approach was ergonomic enough as those of a real partner should be. We would gladly ask ITIDO for help in the future. ”
Lachezar Tsepov, Director IT, Innovations and B2C Marketing, Advent Group
Technologies and processes we used
- MySQL
- Load balancers
- Observations via Grafana
- In-person visits of the data center