Viva Infomedia Pvt Ltd (VIPL), the Mumbai based provider of enterprise mobility solutions relies
heavily on SMS and email alerts. Companies use VIPL's mobile and internet communication mechanisms
to reach out to lakhs of consumers in a single day. And to manage this efficiently, it is important
that the company has a highly scalable IT infrastructure.
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Earlier, VIPL employed infrastructure hosted by VSNL's
data center, and had an in-house team of eight people to oversee IT operations. Then it heard of cloud
computing services, which promised higher scalability. Since VSNL did not have any cloud
offering at that time, VIPL started to scout for an ideal cloud computing service provider.
"Increasing business required that we do not load all data onto a single server. It was essential
to distribute our IT architecture," says Vikram Rai, the founder and managing director of VIPL. The
concern was high scalability. Peak hours in VIPL's business are from 4 pm to 6 pm during the week,
which could escalate manifold on the weekend. This translated to having spare capacity on
tap.
VIPL's search took them to take a demo on GOGrid.com, a US-based company—which didn't work out well
due to latency issues in transactions. It was imperative that the company maintains quick responses
times in SMS transactions. So a cloud computing
service provider based out of India was the only solution. As a result of this realization,
VIPL opted for Netmagic. "I knew about Netmagic. Now there are several players like VSNL and
others, but at that time they did not offer cloud
computing services," says Rai.
New technologies seem to bring with it a certain level of skepticism, and VIPLs' case was no
different before it moved to the cloud
computing service. It built a parallel infrastructure on the cloud
computing service provider, which proved satisfactory after testing. Currently, the company
runs its complete SMS infrastructure through a single Windows box and three Linux servers, which
perform functions such as do-not-call filtering, delivery reports, and SMS transactions (which
connect to the telecom companies). The SMS volumes have also increased from 20 lakh SMSes in 2009
to 20 crore SMSes per month.
Rai is a happy man. "The pricing model is flexible, compared to dedicated servers. Management is
extremely simple, and scalability is a boon," says Rai. VIPL pays Rs 200 per GB per RAM per month
according to its agreement with the cloud
computing service. On the aspect of security, VIPL's transactions use 'https', and passwords
are stored in algorithms.
VIPL now plans to transform itself into a completely cloud based communication company. Rai says,
"It means that all our applications are built on the cloud, and telcos are connected remotely
through it. Thus, any enterprise seeking to take advantage of cost benefits (as well as the
application), can make applications talk to its customers through the end device."