Case Study: One Horizon Group achieves rapid global expansion and major cost savings with Microsoft Azure

Optimized VoIP startup gains global markets with move to the Microsoft Cloud

One Horizon Group is a 22-person Irish developer and operator of carrier‑grade, bandwidth‑efficient VoIP, messaging, and advertising solutions (serving 43 million users across 20 brands). The company’s SmartPacket platform delivered huge bandwidth and battery savings but required a $50,000 upfront hardware install and complex datacenter setups—especially in China—which created a major sales blocker and prevented rapid global expansion.

OHGI migrated fully to Microsoft Azure in nine months, using global virtual machines and Azure services (Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, Azure AD, AIP, Blob storage, VSTS) and partnering with 21Vianet for China. The cloud move cut storage costs by 93% and licensing by a third, reduced sales lead time from months to 1–2 weeks, enabled fast regional deployments, improved monitoring and DevOps, supported 43 million Aishuo downloads, and opened new markets in Latin America and Africa.

One Horizon Group

Peter Hall

Chief Information Officer