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Kydemy supports Dance Studios to overcome COVID 19 with Google Cloud

Dance studios, academies, and schools have been some of the highest affected businesses during the COVID crisis. Lockdown and social distancing do not mix with a business model founded on face-to-face interaction. This situation renders all these businesses redundant; unless they innovate and adapt to the new needs. Kydemy chose the Google Cloud Platform environment for its security, stability, and coverage for all their development needs.

In Short

  • The objective was to bring their services to the cloud and continue serving their students.
  • Kydemy chose the Google Cloud Platform environment for its security, stability, and coverage for all their development needs. 
  • Thanks to Google Cloud and the support of Devoteam, Kydemy has been able to produce and provide its users with an excellent academy management platform and a superior user experience.

“Kydemy has been a useful tool to provide students with content, offering them that content online and quickly, while having control over the classes’ attendance and insights about how the situation evolved thanks to the charts/reports. Being able to use Kydemy has given us peace of mind and the possibility of saving costs.”

About Kydemy

The Kydemy platform helps dance studios and academies to save time and money by improving day-to-day management, communication, accounting, and much more.

Back in 2018, Kydemy detected the need for dance studios and academies to find new ways to organise and manage their businesses. Wasting countless hours in repetitive tasks, no insights about their business metrics, communications problems, and no time left to position their services against the ever-growing competition.

The Problem

There is an urgent need to share videos, documents, links and other resources only with their registered students. The solution had to be reliable, fast, and secure. Furthermore, many different requirements could only be achieved by a fully-featured platform like Kydemy:

  • Categorise these contents by classes/course/styles/levels, so they matched the students’ interests.
  • Grant access to the couses and resources to only those students who had their payments up-to-date.
  • Provide online payments support integrated with the platform and registrations support.
  • It was also essential to be able to track the students’ activity to ascertain the impact of their online work and future viability.
  • On top of that, they had to be able to position their newly created online academies in an environment cluttered with the other online service and classes.

Completing with both well-established platforms and institutions and new online players like themselves, they were being forced to evolve their physical business inot an online/cloud-based model. And Kydemy was their only hope to achieve this in a minimal timeframe.

The Goal

With no time to waste due to the Covid-19 business landscape, Kydemy started to collaborate closely with its customers. The objective was to bring their services to the cloud and continue servinf their students during the difficult weeks of confinement ahead.

The Solution

The Kydemy team envisioned, designed, and executed an ambitious plan to support the newly discovered vital needs of existing and potential new customers. In less than two weeks, it was a reality; Kydemy had a prototype up and running, and customers started to prepare to bring their business to the cloud.

Each academy engaged their students using different channels and strategies, but with a clear message: they could count on them during the severe weeks that laid ahead.

They could upload videos and documents, make them available to their students using the Kydemy web platform and the Kydemy students’ mobile app.

Dance studios planned with the teachers and Kydemy’s guidance their content delivery strategy, and started to record high-quality videos. Students will continue learning steps, musical theory, choreographies, rhythm, warmups, and much more.

The Kydemy system was the perfect foundation to sustain these new and demanding requirements. Developed using the high-performance and highly scalable Go language, the Kydemy Restful API provided the necessary functionality and scalability to manage all the traffic required to solve this challenge.

The videos were uploaded directly to Google Cloud Storage. Then, by using Compute Engine instances, the videos are converted to mobile and web-friendly formats and re-uploaded to Google Cloud Storage. Google Cloud Storage provides us a high-available, reliable, and affordable distribution platform.

Meanwhile, all business data, metadata information, activity, and reports are stored and generated in a Google Cloud SQL instance using all the power of the fantastic PostgreSQL database.

Finally, the students can browse their classes and consume videos and other resources thanks to the Kydemy mobile app. We are delighted to have selected Flutter to build the Kydemy app. Flutter is an agile and efficient mobile development framework that allows us to deliver constant updates with the highest quality results. We are impressed with the productivity and reliability of Flutter; it is an outstanding technology.

“During this crisis, we have seen that many dance studios, pilates/yoga studios, academies, or gyms have decided to wait for it to resolve itself. Kydemy encouraged academies to take an innovative approach, and daring to take the bull by the horns has proven to be the best strategy hands down.”

Methodology

Devoteam’s collaboration, with their knowledge of Google Cloud, helps to accelerate the development of the application and design of the backend infrastructure to support the functionalities and traffic.

We used Google Cloud Platform: using Pillars as Infrastructure Modernization, Data Management, Application Development and Productivity & Collaboration. As managed solutions: Migration,  Database Management, Modern App Dev’t, Collaboration & Productivity, Modern End User Computing, Flutter for Mobile App development

The sessions are stored to be processed to give the best performance to the final users. All of these processes are done smoothly in Google Cloud thanks to the great performance of GCP’s network. All students’ records and administrative information of the academies are saved in the secure and high-performance PostgreSQL auto-managed by Cloud SQL.

The Result

As an example, we will review the numbers of Big South, a Swing academy in Madrid. In 12 days, Big South published the staggering figure of 100+ videos for their students.

In April, BigSouth recorded and distributed another 90 videos, and recorded 1500+ visualizations of their videos by their students.

During this time, Kydemy has helped Big South to innovate. They have dared their students with challenges, choreographies, and other engagement campaigns that have proven successful to keep their students both loyal and entertained during weeks of confinement.

In other words, Big South has been able to retain a great amount of its existing customer base during the worst crisis this sector has lived in modern history.

In total, Kydemy currently hosts 2500+ customer videos, and students have consumed a total of 1TB of content during the month of April. These figures keep growing every day.

Currently, Kydemy is working to integrate native support for real-time streaming capabilities to allow broadcasting live classes directly from the platform and/to the mobile app. This feature will improve customer engagement even further, increase show rates for classes, ensure retention, and open new revenue streams for our customers.