Nextcloud and Collabora scale real-time collaboration to hundreds of millions of users

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Integration build on mature Global Scale architecture benefits large customers and smaller federated installations

Nextcloud GmbH, supplier of the globally most deployed self-hosted content collaboration platform, and Collabora, the driving force behind LibreOffice in the cloud, announce the result of a collaborative effort to make Collabora Online available to customers with tens of millions of users through the innovative Nextcloud Global Scale architecture. The technological advancements also benefit distributed, federated private clouds, enabling cross-cloud collaboration between separate Nextcloud servers that have files shared between them. Global Scale has been in production since 2017 in a commercial setup for tens of millions of users across 4 continents. Several other customers have deployed or began experimenting with Global Scale in the last 2 years. Thanks to the new integration, Collabora Online installations at multi-million user scale are now set to roll out.

Our mission at RENATER is enabling seamless collaboration between over a thousand research and education institutions in France in order to protect the security and confidentiality of data. We study and experiment deeply Nextcloud Global Scale for its highly scalability capacities and its reliability that fit the needs of our project.
— Alexandre Salvat, Drive Project Manager – Pôle Projets Transverses et Innovation (P2TI) – RENATER

As a mature and real world tested solution, Nextcloud Global Scale offers Nextcloud customers a way out of traditional, costly scalability limitations like data center uplinks, load balancers and database, storage and cache. Global Scale enables virtually limitless scalability of Nextcloud deployments at high cost efficiency by transparently distributing users across multiple nodes. This takes away the need for a central database, storage and cache solution, enabling individual nodes to take advantage of inexpensive commodity hardware to save costs and increase flexibility Single production nodes have already shown the ability to scale to 250.000 users as part of a larger Global Scale setup. Even the limitations of a single data center in terms of capacity and up-link do not limit the size of a Global Scale deployment, as nodes can be in any location. This also allows installations to improve performance by moving data closer to the physical location of users or enforce strict data locality rules to comply with legal or security requirements.

“As the market demands every deeper integration of content collaboration technology, partnering with a leading document collaboration provider like Collabora Productivity is the best way to deliver our customers the solution they need”, notes Frank Karlitschek, CEO of Nextcloud GmbH.
“Globally active, demanding enterprises require excellent, real-world tested and truly scalable solutions only our partnership offers.”

Within a Global Scale architecture, enhancements to Collabora allow users from different nodes to transparently collaborate in a single document editing session. This means a combined Nextcloud Global Scale + Collabora instance can deliver real-time document editing at a truly global scale, with users collaborating across data centers, countries and continents.

“As Collabora proceeds to deliver its document editing solutions to exceedingly large enterprises, we are excited to collaborate with a proven scalability leader like Nextcloud. This is vital to meet the needs of big organizations” said Michael Meeks, General Manager at Collabora Productivity.
“Large scale deployments require reliable service combined with the excellent user experience our partnership provides.”

Private users and smaller installations also benefit from the improvements to Nextcloud Global Scale and Collabora Online, gaining the ability to collaborate on documents they have shared between their private clouds. This federation feature, invented by Nextcloud team members and standardized under the Open Cloud Mesh OCS standard, lets users share files between different servers as easy as sending an email.
Several customers are expected to roll out Collabora Online in a Global Scale context, supported by Nextcloud and Collabora. For more information about a Global Scale deployment, contact Nextcloud GmbH.

About Collabora

Collabora Productivity is the driving force behind putting LibreOffice in the cloud, providing Collabora Online and a range of other products and consulting to enterprise and government. Powered by the largest team of certified LibreOffice engineers in the world, it is a leading contributor to the LibreOffice codebase and community. Collabora Office for Desktop and Collabora Online provide a business-hardened office suite with long-term, multi-platform support. Collabora Productivity is a division of Collabora, the global software consultancy dedicated to providing benefits of Open Source to the commercial world, specializing in mobile, automotive and consumer electronics industries. For more information, visit Collabora Office or follow @CollaboraOffice on Twitter

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud offers the industry-leading, fully open source, self-hosted Content Collaboration Platform, combining the easy user interface of consumer-grade cloud solutions with the security and compliance measures enterprises need. Nextcloud brings together universal access to data through mobile, desktop and web interfaces with next-generation, on-premise secure communication and collaboration features like real-time document editing, chat and video calls, putting them under direct control of IT and integrated with existing infrastructure.
Nextcloud’s easy and quick deployment, open, modular architecture and emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing file storage assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit nextcloud.com or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.