Established in 1999, EVI Services Ltd. is the largest information technology service provider in Hong Kong's preschool education market. To date, EVI has successfully helped more than 300 preschools in Hong Kong in their digital transformation. EVI Children's Education Information Network provides both a teaching and an administrative platform, both of which are associated with an extensive library of more than 10,000 textbooks and other multimedia learning materials. These resources can be used for teacher- and parent-directed study as well as augmented study where children can do fun or creative projects. EVI Services Ltd. understands that, by injecting these new and creative elements into a child’s education, parents can stimulate their child’s learning interest, achieving the objective of creating happy parent-child time while also inspiring their child’s endless potential.

Nowadays, the use of information technology to promote learning and teaching has become a steadily growing trend worldwide. Hong Kong is committed to promoting online learning and education activities, and all kindergartens have integrated IT technologies into their teaching curriculums. Traditionally, teachers have a lot of administrative work at a kindergarten. To help lessen the administrative work that teachers need to do so that they can focus more on teaching, EVI hopes to strengthen its systems, especially in terms of how they handle the administrative aspects of their platform. In order to achieve this goal, EVI needed the support of Alibaba Cloud’s web services.

Alibaba Cloud is the number one cloud service provider in China and the greater Asia Pacific region, with services available throughout the globe. Alibaba Cloud has data centers spread across 20 major geographic regions, operating over 63 zones worldwide, with superlatively strong coverage throughout China. All of this means that EVI can provide teaching services to schools around the world, including in Mainland China. Alibaba also has a rich portfolio of products and services, and therefore can provide EVI with the necessary networking and computing infrastructure to support its services and provide EVI with the necessary tools to create a more flexible, scalable, and faster service infrastructure.

Through building an infrastructural solution with Alibaba Cloud, EVI can ensure that it can provide stable and quality web services to its customer schools, fully supporting each school’s administrative and teaching requirements. The proposed architecture includes Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to help bring EVI’s online services to more locations, including Mainland China, Taiwan and Malaysia, without the need for deploying services to more data centers. This solution eliminates the need for EVI to maintain local data centers, reducing IT costs by a margin as large as 30%. Alibaba Cloud’s core computing service Elastic Compute Service (ECS) was also implemented as a flexible and elastic solution to provide the computing power needed to support EVI’s platforms, creating a faster and more stable system while also streamlining costs. With ECS implemented, EVI’s system can be stable and reliable even during peak periods such as when a new school year starts, when school admissions staff, other administrators, as well as teachers and parents are all logging in.

The cloud services provided by Alibaba Cloud have helped to support EVI’s online systems so that EVI in turn can provide higher quality services to its large and diverse body of customers. In the future, EVI hopes to continue to work with Alibaba Cloud to provide parents and schools with the highest quality of services so that both teachers and parents can provide students with memorable and inspiring learning experiences, through student-centric teaching and other enhanced learning platforms.