As telecommunications companies go head-to-head with online service providers to offer Web 2.0-based services, they strive to keep user experience at the forefront of what the Web has to offer. But in today’s competitive landscape, just offering cool new services isn’t enough. The bottom line demands that providers find ways to monetize these services. And to top it off, this tall order includes one more essential item: providers must maintain an absolutely seamless user experience at all times.

 

Today’s Web 2.0 users expect social networking and personal media services as a matter of course. The ability to store and share blogs, photos, music, videos, and other content quickly and easily is the core of the user experience. To stay competitive, service providers constantly seek ways to leverage this core content to offer exciting new services that generate buzz — and revenue — with the performance and 24x7 availability users require.

 

As a provider of white-label, Web 2.0-based applications to large telecoms throughout North America and Europe, we’ve confronted this challenge at Casero. Our clients, including BT, Bell Canada (News - Alert), Eircom, BSkyB, SaskTel, Cox, and Cincinnati Bell, compete directly with some of the world’s most well-known online service providers. Casero has leveraged our existing products to enable our clients to go to market with new, revenue-generating services quickly and cost effectively.

 

 

Recently, one telecom client was looking to offer its subscribers a unique new service. Users on a social networking site would be able to track concerts and other events and check out which ones their friends planned to attend. If they saw an event they wanted to go to, they could then purchase tickets in one seamless transaction.

 

To achieve this goal, Casero’s (News - Alert) social networking application and the back-end ticketing system provided by another vendor needed to work in conjunction and appear as one branded site to the user. At the same time, the business model required a cost-effective solution that could be up and running quickly.

 

At Casero, we evaluated several different approaches and quickly dismissed the possibility of a custom development effort to get the two applications to work together. The time and expense of rewriting the applications immediately ruled out this option.

Instead, we looked into using BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), our Application Delivery Controller (ADC) from F5 Networks (News - Alert), to manage the two applications within one portal. Casero uses BIG-IP LTM in all of our Web 2.0 solutions largely because of F5’s iRules scripting language, which gives us a great deal of flexibility to customize our customers’ application traffic management.

Once we made the decision to use iRules, it took less than an hour to do the actual design and scripting. The Casero custom iRules solution enables users to access the social networking and ticketing capabilities through one seamless portal, but the systems remain completely separate on the back end. The iRule we wrote directs BIG-IP LTM to inspect the incoming requests, determine whether they’re looking for a ticketing component or a social networking component, pull the correct component from the appropriate resource, and then send it back toward the customer.

 

 

In addition to the low expense and fast time to market this solution afforded, maintaining excellent user performance was an equally important consideration for us at Casero. The ticketing system company had been using a different ADC and was initially interested in seeing if that system could be used for the integrated solution. It was clear to us that the other ADC would not meet the performance goals of the joint project.

 

As we’ve developed our product line at Casero, we’ve taken a hard look at performance levels, especially in dealing with SSL. What we find is that it is essential for us to have the rich scripting at layer 7 we get from iRules. Although other solutions offer some of that capability, when we’ve tried to take advantage of it, we’ve taken a huge hit in terms of performance. And sacrificing performance by adding rules is the last thing in the world we want to do.

 

In some cases, Casero’s clients have more than 500,000 subscribers accessing the system, each with the ability to upload and share large volumes of extremely bulky content, especially when it comes to videos and music. With the proliferation of user-generated content in Web 2.0 and the resulting enormous strain on networks, it’s essential to have the horsepower and flexibility to serve up the different applications. Virtualization makes it possible to manage the traffic for all of the applications that are distributed behind the ADC.

 

There’s a fundamental shift in the computing world with virtualization. Gone are the days when we’d have one big system with many applications running on it, and so we need a way to redirect traffic to a specific target area in this virtualized environment. That’s where the flexibility of writing iRules comes into play.

 

 

By successfully integrating the ticketing solution with the social networking site, Casero provided a way for our client to monetize its subscriber base through ticket sales. This type of capability is an important differentiator for us in competing with all of the other companies touting Web 2.0 services.

 

In fact, the flexibility to inspect the HTTP packet components and apply different load-balancing algorithms specific to Casero’s application plays an essential role in our overall service offering. As a result, we can offer differentiated, or tiered, services based on certain profiles.

 

For example, for another client, Casero provides tiered services based on the device the client’s subscribers use to access the application. While the application directed at mobile device users is essentially a scaled-down version of the application served up to IPTV or PC users, mobile phone users pay a premium for subscriber access. To ensure that mobile subscribers are guaranteed a certain quality of service, we use iRules to redirect mobile devices to a cluster of reserved application servers.

 

By creating an iRule that looks for traffic originating from mobile devices, Casero ensures that these subscribers aren’t hitting the same application servers as someone in front of a computer or IPTV (News - Alert). From a business perspective, we want to be sure that if someone is paying for service, they are the prime customer and they get a pristine user experience.

 

In the constantly changing Web 2.0 environment, being able to deliver our products in new ways to a growing customer base worldwide helps Casero offer innovative and revenue-generating services to our customers. For these telecommunications companies, having this flexibility and scalability on their side is essential to satisfying their subscribers’ high expectations and thriving in the ever-expanding business of Web 2.0.