CVision AI helps customers turn imagery into insights with the support of OCI

CVision AI, a leading computer vision company, originated by accident when the founder and CEO, Ben Woodward, was talking to a marine biologist friend about a painstaking struggle to analyze hours of video recordings of fish. After Woodward built software to automate the analysis process, the side hustle evolved over time into the birth of CVision AI. Today, the company’s AI-powered video annotation and media platform, Tator, helps customers primarily in the environmental industry use data science to turn video imagery into insights.

To be successful, CVision AI needed to make quality video easily accessible. Customers traditionally had to share video files on physical hard drives across the world and maintain numerous spreadsheets to track insights. The goal was to simplify that video conversion process for greater collaboration and ease of use. In addition, the company wanted to understand how AI and machine learning algorithms could be operationalized for customers. Instead of marine biologists counting fish manually across hours of video recording, what if a tool could perform that analysis for them?

Given those considerations, being cloud native was essential to support CVision AI’s niche business model and scale for highly variable AI workloads. When the company launched, it used AWS for its cloud infrastructure but soon faced expensive storage and data egress fees along with difficulty getting technical support. Woodward knew a change was needed to support his vision for the company, so he began to explore other options.

After CVision AI got a call from Oracle, the team quickly realized the potential Oracle Cloud could bring to the business. The company selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for its cost-efficiency, performance, support, and alignment with the company’s business model.

OCI would offer the company a much more cost-efficient infrastructure compared to the legacy design of other cloud providers, with superior price-performance and lower compute, storage, and data egress costs. OCI’s payment structure would allow the company to pay for only the cloud capacity it used. Moreover, using OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) would help the company easily set up, manage, scale, and secure clusters of resources for varying customer workloads.

Another important aspect was the quick access to OCI’s engineering teams, something the company didn’t get with AWS. CVision AI uses technology in nonstandard ways, so being able to connect and work with Oracle’s cloud engineers would be crucial as the business evolved.

By adopting OCI as the company’s core infrastructure, Woodward and his team expanded the business cost-efficiently without worrying about infrastructure capacity, security, or performance. With Oracle managing the back end, CVision AI’s Tator platform continued to help more customers take advantage of AI to access, manage, share, and analyze robust video recordings so they can accomplish amazing things in their fields.

CVision AI’s customers have highly variable workloads—some with a steady flow of smaller data demands and others with massive influxes of data every few months—so sizing up infrastructure for the highest demand would quickly put financial stress on the business. The company was able to use OCI features, such as flex shapes, to right-size its infrastructure on demand for each customer, balancing resources for videos, capacities, and AI workloads. This way, customers get the high performance they expect, while the company saves time and money that can be funneled back into the business to increase its client base and develop new features for users.

OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes also furthered CVision AI’s push for efficiency. By merging workflows, processes, and AI algorithms in clusters for each customer, OKE helped ensure consistent operations across distinct workloads. It provided automatic patching, upgrades, and scaling, so the company doesn’t have to create custom scaling rules. Additionally, the service streamlines the provisioning of new nodes when they’re needed, something that was difficult to do quickly with other cloud providers. This allowed the company to offer high availability as demand spiked with new influxes of video data.

After adopting OCI, the access to Oracle’s cloud engineers has proved invaluable. The world-class support helped create a true partnership that continues to pay dividends for CVision AI. Combining this high level of care with the price-performance benefits of Oracle Cloud helped the business mature, giving Woodward and his team the confidence to take on larger clients in new industries.