Playing by the Rules
Having a local contractor or subsidiary will always make doing business in a foreign country much easier. In order to sell cars inside of China, General Motors set up another company uniquely called General Motors China. What if your organization is not as big as GM? In today's connected world, sometimes spinning up another application instance inside of a geography is not possible due to costs, security, workforce bandwidth, or simply politics. How can your company serve China without investing in China based infrastructure? The choices are simple; do not do business in China, work with a reseller, or work with a carrier. Unless you want to miss out on marketing to twenty percent of the worlds population and are not interested in putting your intellectual property in the hands of another entity, there is only one true option; go down the carrier route.Connecting the Dots
The idea for this article came from reading about "The Unsexiest Trillion-dollar Startup" called Flexport. Flexport is a freight shipping analytics company. Meaning, they own no infrastructure, just mine data. Flexport then connects organizations with the data required to ship cargo based on the most efficient route. Flexport does not have relationships personally with organizations hosted in countries like China, but they know what partners do. In a way Felxport is a broker managing relationships with those who have something to transfer and those who can accept packages at the required destination.Can't Ship Packets in Cargo Crates
Although Flexport helps organizations transfer hard goods, what about soft(ware) goods? Teridion follows a similar playbook to that of Flexport. Teridion is not going to add any additional infrastructure to what you manage since the platform is SaaS but the platform offers end users access to data as if the application server was hosted locally. The Teridion network leverages Teridion Cloud Routers (TCRs) as shipping ports on either side of the journey. You just tell us where you want data to go, and the platform will make sure the traffic gets there.Partnership with Cloud Providers to Reach China Market
Teridion is a proud partner of the cloud provider Alibaba Cloud to reach China users. Teridion leverages multiple global and regional cloud providers to provide the "ship from" ports and then drops off traffic at one of the many inner-China locations. What have users of the Teridion network been experiencing? Well for starters, applications that were previously timing out to China based users are not only accessible, but are boasting some pretty impressive speeds. To put it in perspective, last week I was working with a company that had intermittent availability issues from an end user located in China. The application was hosted in Europe due to data privacy reasons. When the application was not timing out due to network issues, tests ran using the public internet were getting blazing speeds of 20kb/s-100kb/s. Switching on Teridion upped the transfer rate to 2Mb/s consistently. This is opening up a whole new territory to a company who thought their only choice was to shard their application closer to China.You Pack It, We Ship It
Getting a package faster is great, but it is worthless if the contents are damaged before the cargo reaches the requestor. Teridion simply routes traffic faster. This means if you encrypt your traffic, Teridion will deliver it with the same encryption to the end user. Some other sources will require access to the content for acceleration, but that has cause for concern for private information. Teridion has no such requirement so you can rest assured the only person viewing your data is the intended recipient.Too good to be true? Give us an jingle and prove us wrong.
