Compodium

Compodium is a leading provider of secure video conferencing solutions for business, facilitating browser, client and mobile apps based, platform agnostic communication for a range of global customers.

Based close to the Arctic circle in northern Sweden, Compodium was founded in 1997 by Bengt Grahn. Coming from a background in telecommunications and audio recording, Bengt saw that the Internet offered an unparalleled opportunity for easy, cost-efficient, and secure video communications.

We spoke to CEO Bengt Grahn about the challenges and opportunities his business faces and why he turned to Hydro66 for data colocation services.

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His challenge (one which he ultimately saw as an opportunity), however, was that there were numerous competing protocols on offer, many of which were incompatible with each other. What was needed was a shift in thinking – a platform-agnostic solution that could do all the heavy lifting transparently in the background, while offering business customers an intuitive, secure platform for communication, both internally and externally.

Reputation was a key piece of the puzzle – for Compodium’s solution to have credibility, it needed to have guaranteed uptime and security to meet the expectations of major Enterprise customers. Despite heavy investment in in-house data storage racks, Bengt was conscious that his expertise lay in the field of communications, not in server hosting. With a small team focused on their core business model, it was proving more costly and time-consuming to meet the compliance requirements for secure and safe facility management, not to mention providing the guaranteed uptime and quality that Compodium’s customers demanded. The decision was therefore made to look for a colocation data center provider.
“We realised that we could not continue to be experts in cooling and UPS systems – we needed to find friends who could unburden us from providing those kinds of services, so we could focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.” .

The procurement brief was more demanding than usual.

From the outset, Compodium has been built as a company that sees video conferencing not just as a convenience or business asset, but as a service that can contribute to a better society. If we can reduce the number of physical meetings and travel – and do so in an ethically and environmentally responsible way – then we can make a genuine, measurable impact on the future of the planet.

“Video-conferencing technologies such as Skype, Teams, Hangout, Webex, Polycom, and others – these are all good services, but they are not compatible with each other. Compodium offers a service that does not compete, but rather complements – everyone can have a seat in the digital meeting room”

It was with the transformative power of technology in mind that Bengt started his search for a colocation data center that shared his world view, one that combined technical expertise with ethical responsibility.

Based in the north of Sweden at the intersection of three major electricity grids, Hydro66 offered two significant advantages that caught Bengt’s eye.

Hydro66 was the natural choice. Firstly, their proximity to an overabundance of clean hydroelectric power meant that the possibility of an interruption to supply was basically non-existent. Secondly, the choice of cool-climate northern Sweden meant that very little electricity was required for rack-cooling, further reducing the environmental footprint.

The geographical location of Hydro66 was perfect. In addition to lying on the hub of three major electricity grids, Hydro66 also benefits from super-fast fiber-optic connectivity, resulting in speeds and minimal latency that far exceeded Compodium’s requirements for delivering the video quality that their customers demanded. As a cloud-based company with global customers and ambitions, the exact geographical location of Compodium’s data center was much less important than customer experience.

Hydro66’s expertise in providing constantly available green power, cooling and connectivity meant that Bengt could concentrate on his key mission – that of bringing secure, effective, disruptive video communication to the world – without being distracted by keeping up to date with the technical demands of managing the building facilities.

With Compodium being an entirely cloud-based solution aimed at a global business audience, the exact geographical location was less important than security, reliability and energy efficiency.

While latency is a factor in any high quality video service, fast fiber optic connections to the rest of Europe make the distance effectively irrelevant. In fact, physical location – and challenging the accepted wisdom of the need for business travel – are at the heart of Bengt’s philosophy:

“We need to move from an old-fashioned physical view of travelling to work and meetings, often with fossil fuel transportation, to a new, clean, super-effective and disruptive way of conducting secure, private conversations and work processes – we’ve found the solution”

Having chosen Hydro66 as his data colocation partner, Bengt is now free to focus on business expansion, winning major new contracts that combine his twin passions of bringing the world closer together while securing its future. Hydro66 has allowed him the freedom to pursue these goals, safe in the knowledge that he has a solution that is scalable, secure, reliable, and environmentally minded.