Business scaling 101: EDUardo enhances business education experiences and serves thousands of users with Azure

EDUardo is a dynamic Hungarian business simulation born out of a shift in the technological landscape. "Most business courses available online consist of videos, written materials, and presentations. However, learning concepts such as business planning, change management, leadership, or sustainability require a practical element,” explains Peter Szlavik, Founder and CEO of EDUardo. “Our mission is to make business education experiential, understandable, and fun. We offer a solution that is essentially a serious game.” 

EDUardo’s modules cover a diverse array of topics, from business skills to sustainability and accounting for managers, reflecting its founders’ entrepreneurial spirit and innovative vision.

Peter Szlavik and Gergő Docsa’s previous startup faced scaling problems due to an over-reliance on trainers, teachers, and domestic channels. EDUardo’s Chief Technology Officer, Gergő Docsa aspired to build a more customized platform for customers, but this amplified its scaling issues.

The previous edtech startup of the founders emphasized group-based activities, which required an instructor who knew the rules and could guide the participants. “It was enjoyable for the end users, but it was difficult to manage as well as scale since the number of participants had to be limited,” describes Peter. “So, we started to focus more on e-learning offerings. The possibility that we could handle thousands more users was truly thrilling.” 

Offering higher quality education at a larger capacity

To improve its e-learning offerings, EDUardo looked to Microsoft Azure.  “The most important factors we were looking for were reliability and scalability — Azure offered these, as well as global availability.” 

By replacing its rented local servers with Azure’s cloud-based service, the company saw significant improvements in its capabilities. “We used to face issues in computing capacity and load bearing—if too many people were using the service, it would either slow down or shut down. There was also a lot of unexpected downtime,” explains Gergő. “Since we switched over to Azure, we’ve reduced our downtime to only 48 minutes a year, which is practically nothing. It’s a huge step forward in reliability for our service.”

The new platform can also be easily tailored to a client's needs at speed, featuring their logo and privacy policy. “Previously, it took three to five days to create a white label server for clients,” Gergő says. “Since we moved to Azure and started using continuous delivery functions, setting up a new server with a custom domain and personalized parameters takes only one to two hours. That’s an incredible improvement.”

In addition, EDUardo is now set up to automatically scale using Azure App Services, while Azure Functions handles the business simulation calculations. Apart from this, the company uses virtual machines for small and predictable workloads. Meanwhile, MySQL Database serves users from all around the world, with backup services enabled for added security.

In early 2022, EDUardo decided to make its training catalogue available on the Azure Marketplace and bring its experiential education solutions to more business professionals. The speedy and smooth integration only took a few weeks. Gergő recalls, "Microsoft outlined all the necessary steps we needed to take to have a transactable solution. Once we received integration examples, it only took a couple of days to make our offerings available on the Azure Marketplace. Straightforward and easy—the support experience from Microsoft was great.” 

Creating customer satisfaction and inspiring growth

By listing its Azure-powered solutions on the Azure Marketplace, EDUardo reached further and projected a sense of reliability to customers. “Our customers include global banks or education institutions that emphasize high international standards in quality and security,” explains Peter. “As many people are familiar with the capabilities of Microsoft, being official partners and using the Azure technology already gives customers a sense of trust.” 

For instance, OTP Bank, one of its major customers, engaged EDUardo to create a customized solution for simulating bank branches, a resource now extended to several markets as a standard learning case. As Peter puts it, "It's an exercise in people management where current or future bank managers can experiment with running a branch, engaging with employees and customers, reporting, and making managerial decisions." 

The Budapest Business School, another longstanding customer, enjoys increased flexibility and utility by accessing EDUardo’s Azure-based services. “We serve thousands of students annually,” Gergő explains. “Not only do they use our platform to learn, but they also integrate it as a fundamental element of the coursework." 

Creating global impact through digital learning

EDUardo plans to bolster its presence on the Azure Marketplace in the near future, refining its visibility. EDUardo is also spearheading a green transformation in business education through its Sustainability module, developed in collaboration with Chilean firm EcoEd. The new Sustainability module enables professionals to virtually play out sustainable business management scenarios and witness the immediate outcomes of their decisions. 

To further enrich student engagement and performance, the firm has integrated AI within its simulations, allowing for interactive learning experiences, thereby opening a spectrum of opportunities to innovate in digital learning. The customer feedback received from AI trials, according to Peter, is overwhelmingly positive; customers are thrilled by the cutting-edge technologies EDUardo brings to the table.

With the right foundation set, EDUardo is empowered to keep moving forward. Gergő concludes, “We have never been calmer since we joined Azure and benefited from its solutions. It gives us the peace of mind that even if something fails, there is automation in place to speed up backups and restorations. We feel secure, and you can’t put a price tag on that.”