Marcellus provides a convenient and affordable Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) video platform that allows its clients to deliver high quality videos from within their own Websites. The Marcellus video platform service is available in a variety of packages designed to accommodate beginning content publishers up to large organizations. In addition, Marcellus creates custom plans for enterprises with very large bandwidth requirements. Established in 2007, the company has employees based in North America and India.
Marcellus has incorporated Amazon Web Services (AWS) extensively within its architecture. The company stores content on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and then distributes that content via Amazon’s Web-based content delivery service, Amazon CloudFront. Marcellus uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to run its clients’ encoding processes. Within Amazon EC2, Marcellus uses the Auto Scaling function to help the company scale its capacity to meet fluctuating demand.In addition, video queuing is handled by Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which provides a scalable means of storing content as it is distributed between application components.
Although Marcellus is not currently operating fully on AWS, it plans to migrate to Amazon’s simple non-relational data store, Amazon SimpleDB, in the near future. The benefit of Amazon SimpleDB is that it offers scalability, flexibility, and high availability without the stringent requirements of a relational database.
Marcellus has experienced several benefits from AWS, including a reduction in the preparation time the company required to reach its market. The CEO of Marcellus, Preetam Mukherjee says, “Adopting AWS reduced our time to market by at least a year, which was crucial for us, given the Asia-Pacific market space we were targeting.”
The company points to several examples where their partnership with AWS was instrumental in helping key clients. For example, an important Marcellus client is the Jagran Group, which publishes India’s second most-read daily newspaper. The Jagran Group is employing the Marcellus platform to provide video content on the newspaper’s companion Website, which reportedly has over 1.5 million viewers per month. Within two weeks of launching the Marcellus video platform, the Jagran Group delivered over 300 hours of video content to its viewers. A Jagran Group representative states, “After months of evaluating online video platforms from across the world, we settled on Marcellus as the platform of our choice. They’re an exciting bunch, extremely passionate about this space, with the ability to execute fast.”
Additionally, Marcellus has learned a considerable amount from the various AWS support resources and developer communities. Preetam Mukherjee states, “There have been positive lessons aplenty, but the biggest one is that there is a tremendous support community for AWS developers—without which, our learning curve would have been far steeper.”
Currently, Marcellus is planning to expand beyond its Asia-Pacific market into the North American market. The company attributes AWS with helping it to maintain its growth and seek future expansion. Preetam Mukherjee says, “AWS is brilliant in that it helps us continue to iterate on our business model of offering value added infrastructure. With the diversity of infrastructure resources (storage, content delivery, servers, queuing, logging) we use, the AWS cloud is the only solution we know of that allows us to efficiently do our job, affordably and reliably.”
Amazon Case Study: Marcellus
Date: 28-08-2013