Agora Selects Leostream for Digital Workspace Management for Global Network of CG Pros, Animators, VFX Artists

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Leostream Corporation, creator of the world-leading Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform, announced today that Agora, a global network of more than 6,000 computer graphic artists providing freelance services to media studios across the world, has selected the Leostream platform to connect its distributed workforce while meeting the security requirements of its clients.

Montreal-based Agora closes the gap between artists and studios, offering a talent pool of pros in fields like animation, 3D graphics, and visual effects for projects including feature films, television, gaming, advertising and virtual reality. Like many in media and entertainment, Agora relies on cloud services to deliver a secure, scalable, and always-accessible studio environment. Its provider’s custom broker and gateway, however, ultimately fell short in both performance and reliability—critical flaws when collaborating on major projects with international contributors.

Instead, Leostream delivered a digital workspace solution to accommodate a diverse and distributed team that allowed seamless collaboration across the entire pipeline while maintaining the performance and security standards required for even large-scale projects.

“Our deployment is designed to support the production of a full feature film, involving every department from rigging and animation to lighting and final rendering,” said Patrick Coulombe, Agora co-founder and CTO. As a proof of concept, Agora began using the platform on a short film, “Transferable,” which Coulombe said served as a solid foundation to refine processes and prove the system's capability for increasingly complex productions.

The Leostream platform provided several added benefits for Agora including the ability to effectively simulate and control project costs, such as cloud-based GPU workstations for high-performance tasks—which has proven invaluable for budgeting and planning. When working on high-profile Hollywood projects, protecting intellectual property is essential; Leostream helps Agora maintain high security practices by hosting all workstations within a virtual private cloud.

Agora plans to expand their use of the platform and further integrate their on-premise and cloud infrastructures. A new space in Montreal will host a render farm and some on-prem workstations. To maximize efficiency and resource utilization, it is considering using thin clients that connect via Leostream and repurposing their workstations as blades for the render farm.

“As we continue to grow, we anticipate Leostream will remain a vital part of unifying and optimizing our workflows,” Coulombe said.

Coulombe also praised Leostream’s sales, deployment, and support teams. “They provide straight answers and clear milestones, ensuring smooth implementation and ongoing support. They genuinely listen to client needs—you can even nudge them towards feature requests, and they take it seriously. On top of that, their sales approach was refreshingly non-aggressive, focusing on truly understanding our requirements. Overall, a 10/10 experience.”

“Modern creative studios face similar challenges such as appropriate performance and latency for graphics- and data-intensive workloads, but Agora has a unique need in having more than 6,000 artists on call who can be assigned to entertainment and media projects and need access to resources,” said Karen Gondoly, Leostream CEO. “Agora’s team, their cloud provider, and our in-house specialists did a tremendous job architecting a robust and performant system that gives them a productive, secure, scalable, and collaborative environment.”

Leostream, which took home an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy® in 2022, empowers media and entertainment professionals with seamless, secure, and high-performance workspace management solutions. As the industry’s leading resource for digital workspace access and connection management, Leostream helps studios, post-production teams, and creatives optimize their workflows—ensuring they can collaborate efficiently from anywhere. The comprehensive solution helps maintain productivity, control costs, and ensure security with strict authentication and authorization that gives users access to only the specific resources they have permission to use, automatically, regardless of their location or device. Learn more about how Leostream supports broadcast, media, and entertainment users at https://leostream.com/media-entertainment-industry.

About Leostream

Leostream digital workspace management solutions embody over 20 years of Leostream research and development in supporting customers with hosted desktop environments, including VDI, hybrid cloud, and high-performance display protocols. The Leostream high performance Remote Desktop Access Platform provides the world’s most robust digital workspace connection management and remote access feature set, allowing today’s enterprises to choose the best-of-breed components to satisfy their complex security, cost, and flexibility needs while working with them as they evolve into tomorrow. The Leostream Privileged Remote Access service simplifies, secures, and monitors temporary access to corporate resources for vendors, service providers, and external contractors. Follow Leostream on LinkedIn and X.

Leostream is a registered trademark of Leostream Corporation in the United States. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.