Ten Years Ago...
Posted by Marc Sheldon in Announcements on January 20, 2007 | 0 Comments
Ten years ago, the founders of Bizanga worked with the team that built and ran what was then the largest global Internet backbone. We worked through the night putting systems in place. We woke up in the middle of the night when these same systems failed. We - again - worked through the night with vendors to fix them.
At that time, large-scale E-mail platforms usually ran on a cluster of open source systems. These were modified to suit the different operator requirements and then networked with other systems. The network became a massive, Kraken-like set of programs only partly understood by those who had integrated and coded them through many caffeine-fueled night shifts. Managers, in turn, lost sleep on what would happen if the coffee stopped doing its job or, heaven forbid, the programmer left the company.
Because we value our (and your) sleep and believe that we are all entitled to it, we wanted to build the most scalable, flexible and feature-rich messaging and E-mail platform - the Intelligent Message Processor (IMP) and its companion products. What we built and install today is different from the technology we used ten years ago in the following areas:
Scalability
Developed from the ground up to handle messaging protocols and their content, we set out to build the IMP so that it's more scalable than what existed by a factor of 10 to 1000. Tier-1 operators grow massively and needed something to handle their reqiurements.
Flexibility
No two customers are alike. Service providers deploy networks differently to match the needs of their customers. We conceived the IMP map any service provider policy, service or capability through simple configuration. Should coding be required for new transport protocols or new ways of handling message streams, we wanted customers to gain new capabilities as fast as possible.
Integration capability
Legacy deployments drive costs. Operators don't have the luxury to start from scratch, so they needed something that can fit their existing IT environments. This requirement drove the need to build the IMP so it integrates with almost any existing system out of the box. Instead of coding or using mediation platforms, the IMP comes with configurable connectors to easily modify the IMP to meet the operators' needs.
Reliability
We created a service level agreement that provides guaranteed availability of a deployed platform to stand out from other SLAs. As a result, the IMP minimizes or eliminates downtime and message loss.
Application platform
With many high quality applications on the market, we believed it best to work with the best vendors instead of try to build our own when we're not experts. So we built the IMP so it tightly integrates with best vendor applications and easily collapse several infrastructure layers into one. As a result, operators minimize their costs thanks to the consolidation of the information flow between these applications and scaling their deployment.
Multiprotocol capability
Protocol convergence requires platforms supporting both future protocols as well as all currently used messaging protocols. The IMP’s modular architecture supports protocols through protocol modules, which can be added to an existing platform to support new messaging protocols. The IMP can concurrently support multiple messaging protocols on the same platform, allowing for interworking and gateway features.
While it sounds like a tall and impossible order, our vision is to provide a set of products that enables operators to fulfill and exceed the needs of their customers on messaging products. That is what drives us and leads to sleepless nights to build and grow such a product.
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