MOZAT Mobile Enterprise Solution for Microsoft Office 2003

Customer Profile
MOZAT is an innovative Singapore-based start up, spun off from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2002 and backed by both NUS Venture Support and the Economic Development Board of Singapore. In just 3 years, the company's carrier, enterprise SMS (Short Message Services) and MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services) solutions have already been selected by many of the region's leading telcos and businesses, including China Mobile, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (iDA), Jobstreet.com, SooKee, Singtel.

Business Situation

MOZAT's SMS and MMS enterprise applications technology was initially implemented based on Linux, on behalf of small and medium-sized enterprises, commonly serving no more than 100 users. In order to capitalize on fast-growing market demand for enterprise mobility solutions, MOZAT needed to support enterprise implementations serving 30,000 users or more, and mobile operator implementations serving many millions. MOZAT quickly found that its system based on Linux could not scale to these levels, and was costing the young company precious resources in technical training and support.

Solution

MOZAT decided to migrate from its Linux Server and MySQL-based offering to the Windows Server System. The migration enabled MOZAT to deliver scalable solutions to a whole new enterprise market segment. At the same time, Windows enabled MOZAT to increase the attractiveness of its offering in terms of ease-of-use, increased reliability, more efficient implementation processes, high-level security, and not least interoperability with the heterogeneous systems employed by the majority of its enterprise customers.

Benefits

• Highly scalable solution
• Efficient and predictable application development environment
• Enables mission-critical interoperability with heterogeneous server and mobile client systems
• Intuitive and familiar interfaces for non-technical end users
• Meets end customers increasing demands for security
• Significantly reduced implementation and maintenance costs
• Access to Microsoft technical support

MOZAT estimates that its addressable market opportunity has increased by a factor of at least three as a result of the increased scalability afforded by the Microsoft platform. The choice of the Microsoft platform also enabled a 50 percent reduction in MOZAT's costs of providing technical support for its customers. As a start up with the majority of its costs tied up in technical human resources, it represents a significant business transformation for this Singapore company that promises to be a regional and global leader in its field.

Situation

MOZAT began as a spin-off company founded by a group of National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers and academics, and has evolved into a leading mobile solution provider with hundreds of enterprise customers in Asia and worldwide.

Winner of the Asia Pacific ICT Award 2004 in the communications applications category, MOZAT's Pan-Asian presence includes operations in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and a strong foothold in China. Its principal investors are National University of Singapore Venture Support, and the Economic Development Board, Singapore.

"When we started, we looked at PDA-based applications. It soon became clear, however, that the growth opportunity lay in mobile communications, and that enterprise rather than consumer applications offered the greatest opportunity for the company to add value and thereby find its niche,"explains Michael Yin, co-founder and CEO of MOZAT. Since that early setting of direction, progress has been dramatic.

Customers now include telecom carriers, enterprises, educational institutions, service providers and system integrators, including blue chip names such as Singapore Telecom, China Mobile, and all of the local polytechnics and universities.

MOZAT's vision is simple: enable its customers to send anything on a PC to a mobile phone as MMS/SMS, and send it via the Internet, GPRS modem, or Mobile Phone.
MOZAT's R&D and implementation teams, based in Singapore and Shanghai, were tasked with making that vision a reality, developing and rolling out innovative solutions including:

• SMS/MMS Messaging System & GPRS/CDMA Video Solution
• Inter-Carrier MMS/SMS Messaging hub
• GPRS/CDMA & 3G Wireless Video Solution

In bringing these solutions to market, MOZAT discovered that its choice of software as the platform for its solutions was critical.
The limitations of Linux

While MOZAT relied on Microsoft Windows and Office Applications on the desktop from Day One, the company chose open source software like the Apache web server and the MySQL database in developing its early technologies in a bid to keep costs low. The limitations of this approach soon became apparent, however, in terms of performance, development resources, reliability, the costs of technical support, ease of use, and ¨C most importantly -- scalability.

MOZAT found that its Linux-based solutions could not be deployed effectively for more than a few hundred users. The market opportunity, however, was being able to deploy to tens of thousands of enterprise users. The choice of Linux was holding the company back from reaching the sweet spot it had identified in the enterprise market.

The limitations of Linux didn't stop there. For its mVision video MMS offering, for example, MOZAT found that MySQL was unsuitable for this data-heavy application and was unable to handle complex data manipulations. "Anything over 4 gigabytes would not work,"says Yin. "Microsoft SQL Server scales much better, and we have not yet found an upper limit."

From a development point of view, a critical disadvantage of Linux was the lack of reliable technical help. "There are some great guys in the Linux community,"explains Yin. "But if we have a problem, we can't rely on someone out there who can help, or who's willing to help. We often had to try our luck on search engines just to try and identify solutions!"

MOZAT also found the costs of supporting Linux-based implementations to be prohibitive, and unpredictable, making software support and maintenance even harder to manage. In some cases, customers had to buy additional servers on which to run their Linux solution, rather than reuse existing Windows-based hardware.

When technical issues arose, customers would either have to reboot, causing costly downtime for them, or ¨C in as many as 50 percent of cases ¨C would need on-site support from MOZAT technicians to determine the problem and solution.

"Linux tends to work for routine or server-based applications, where scale is not so critical. This created a situation where we had to tell our customers to "don't touch that machine!"because glitches and bugs cannot be readily spotted or fixed," says Yin. "In some cases our users couldn't even work out how to reboot."

"The majority of our users are business people, not technical staff," says Yin. "They understand intuitive graphical interfaces, not Linux scripts." MOZAT also found to its cost that even clients' internal IT support teams would frequently lack the skills to solve even relatively simple Linux problems.

Although MOZAT's technical support team was all Linux-trained, only one employee possessed the necessary in-depth knowledge and expertise required. For a rapidly growing company like MOZAT, this concentration on expertise in just one staff posed a significant business risk.

The solution

In late 2004,MOZAT's core management team decided to seek an alternative solution, and concluded that the only platform capable of meeting the company's needs for scalability, security, total cost of ownership and interoperability was Microsoft Windows.

MOZAT then began to deploy a whole host of Microsoft solutions, which now forms the foundation as an integral component of many of its commercial products. For example, The MOZAT Inter-Carrier MMS Hub offers a multi-carrier report server that uses Microsoft Windows Server to provide a reliable platform for billing administration.

In the enterprise space, MOZAT's flagship M2U SMS/MMS Gateway for Enterprises is completely based on Microsoft SQL Server 2003, LCS, MSN, Outlook, and Exchange.

The system extends the Microsoft Office 2003 experience to mobile phones, enabling users to easily access email or collaborate with colleagues from the desktop or mobile phone. Furthermore, it offers a comprehensive framework to mobilize enterprise applications, providing services to connect enterprise applications, push data to mobile devices and connect mobile applications. The system uses Microsoft software to enable integration between web, email and CRM systems, including interoperability with all common enterprise messaging platforms. SMS /MMS or PUSH based data processing is completely automatic, while programmability is enabled by APIs for VC++, VB and C#.

The system is compatible with any GPRS network, and supports sophisticated traffic statistics analysis.

The Windows Advantage

MOZAT's decision to migrate to the Microsoft Windows platform secured the future growth potential for its enterprise and carrier offerings by enabling the company to build scalable solutions addressing the needs of the market for functionality and, above all, scale. Additionally, Microsoft Windows addressed all the limitations the company had encountered with Linux.

The extensive technical support available with the Windows platform has also improved MOZAT's productivity in application development and implementation.

"Windows support is always available, which means that we can plan and predict development and implementation schedules more effectively, even though our projects are on a larger scale than ever before,"explains Yin. "As we grow, we can manage our business more effectively."

Yin also notes that the company's development work is highly object-oriented and template-driven, allowing components and solutions to be utilized again instead of having to design common elements from scratch every time.

This is in comparison with its previous Linux-based approach where every development was a one-off, stand-alone project that was near impossible to replicate on subsequent implementations.

Security is another area in which Microsoft delivers for MOZAT.

"It's pretty clear that no-one cares more about security than Microsoft," says Yin. "Security is a critical concern among larger enterprise customers, and they are choosing Microsoft as their platform. BY choosing Microsoft, we offer our customers the assurance that adding MOZAT applications will enhance the security of their enterprise systems."

MOZAT employs an extensive Microsoft footprint as it uses several solutions including Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Microsoft Office XP and Office 2003, Microsoft Project 2003, Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and Microsoft SQL Server 2003. Using solutions from a single vendor offers tighter integration, greater security and a lower level of vulnerabilities as compared to using software from different vendors that may be incompatible. In addition, since its IT infrastructure is built on the same Windows platform, there is greater reliability and employees only have to deal with the same familiar user interface.

Enabling business expansion

MOZAT's growing business is based on offering mobility to the majority of larger enterprises that not only rely on Microsoft desktop and productivity applications, but also deal with heterogeneous back-end server and database systems and applications. Above all, these enterprises have employees that use multiple brands and versions of handset operating systems.

MOZAT's Windows-based solution is engineered to provide the interoperability between applications and users' devices that enterprises increasingly need.

To MOZAT the difference is summed up by scale. The market for its earlier Linux-based products was limited to small and medium-sized enterprises with 100 users or fewer. Despite its size, the costs of addressing this market proved prohibitive, particularly with an IT platform as resource-intensive as Linux.

The scalability afforded by the Microsoft platform is now enabling MOZAT to effectively address a market it estimates to be at least ten times larger than before, with the lower costs and increased manageability that are crucial to an early stage company such as MOZAT.

Michael Yin sums it up: "Previously we were fighting our war alone, in an environment where customers were making big demands in terms of scale and reliability. Now with Microsoft, we have an ally that allows us to leverage our resources, add value and build our business."

ABOUT MOZAT Pte Ltd

MOZAT Pte Ltd was incorporated in 2003 by a group of PhD research scholars and professor from the National University of Singapore. Our Research & Development team members have solid backgrounds with years of solutions development experience, and are well recognized by the industry. MOZAT, the leading enterprise mobile solutions provider, develops carrier-grade and enterprise-class mobile solutions for enterprises, mobile carriers, software providers and device manufacturers. MOZAT has won industry awards by providing total, reliable and scalable mobility solutions that connect almost every device and application available. Some of the corporations that are “Powered by MOZAT” include China Mobile, China Unicom, SingTel and TIGO. For more information, please visit www.mozat.com .