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Overview

Country or region: India

Industry: Communications

Customer Profile

Net4 is the leading pan-India IP communications service provider that offers Internet based services such as domain registration, Web hosting, data center operations, business e-mail solutions, internet telephony services and Internet access services.

Business Situation

The Linux and MySQL based billing solution could not cope with the growth of the company. Net4 required a scalable and reliable solution to manage its operations.

Solution

The company migrated the data and application to Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 and SQL Server 2005 for higher scalability and realiability.

Benefits

■ Improves customer experience

■ Sub second application response time

■ Reduces cost of operations

■ Faster and better quality development

■ Improved maintainence

| | |Customers are looking for millisecond response time which the Linux and MySQL was unable to cope with. We wanted our Web servers to return queries in milliseconds. This has been achieved by the new application running on SQL Server™ 2005 and Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0.”

Desi S Valli, ED & COO, Net4India

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| | | |Net4 has quickly grown to become a leading pan-Indian Communications company with over a million |

| | | |customers across the country. When Net4 wanted to deliver a better, more consistent customer |

| | | |experience, it turned to the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 programming model. The Technology team |

| | | |used Windows® Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation to simplify, speed up and |

| | | |future-proof the its applications. |

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| | | |More importantly, with a seamless, secure, and reliable connection across the e-commerce portal, Net4|

| | | |can provide a superior customer experience. |

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Situation

Net4 is the leading pan-India IP communications company with points of presence (POP) in seven (7) locations throughout the country. Net4 is the only Indian Internet communications company with service provisioning ability on a multitude of Internet based services such as domain registration, Web hosting, data center operations, business e-mail solutions, Internet telephony services and Internet access services.

Its key business units are:

■ Business Internet Access: Net4’s business Internet access solutions provides services to over 600 corporate and SME clients across the seven major cities in India.

■ Phonewala: Net4’s Internet telephony service with over 100,000 business users and 3000 VoIP call shops across the country

■ Net4Domains: Web services brand hosts 75,000 web sites; 800,000 corporate e-mail accounts; more than 250,000 domain customers

It is an ICANN Accredited Registrar and the first service provider in the world to have been awarded the ISO 27001 certification for Information Security for all its data centers.

With its mission-critical applications, extensive investment in state-of-the-art technology, highly secure data centers forming redundant and robust high capacity network backbone, Net4 has a proven customer satisfaction track record.

Net4 had built its portal on open standards i.e. Linux as the operating system and MSQL as the database. One of the application module tracks VoIP usage of each customer. The application queries a customer’s records and displays it to the customer.

There were three key issues with the solution. First, each record had over eight fields for each one minute long call. Each month the company clocks close to 10 million minutes and has to keep records for six months. This means that the application at any given point has 60 million records. With over a million users, the solution had become slow, affecting the customer experience. The company wanted to invest in a more scalable solution. The idea is to reduce the investment by making a single application portal that will handle all services, that includes domain registration, hosting, business email, VoIP services billing, provisioning and reporting of the services.

Secondly, from a development and maintenance perspective, the updates on Perl and CGI are infrequent. This meant that the team internally had to develop any updates that it felt were necessary for the application. Reliability had to be maintained by the Net4 technology team. The company wanted to invest in a solution that would provide a reliable technology platform for high usage data center environment.

The third and final issue was the high cost of manpower. Sine there is scarcity of skilled manpower on Linux and open source technologies, the associated costs are also much higher.

Solution

Net4 decided to migrate its e-commerce portal which was running on Linux to Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and migrating the database from MySQL to SQL Server 2005.

The application was built using Visual C#® and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, a part of Windows® Vista to improve the user experience. It uses Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communications Foundation.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides developers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows client user experiences that incorporate user interfaces, media, and documents. It allows developers to separate user interface definitions from run-time logic.

The solution was designed keeping in mind enhancement of the user experience, catalog management and back-end integration for service delivery. The key focus areas were:

• User Experience

• Performance

• Extensibility

• Object Model

• Best Practices

• Integration

The data was migrated from MySQL into SQL Server 2005.

Net4 prepared migration scripts to transform data from the old-world system to the new-world system, while ensuring business continuity and data integrity.

The migration process included extracting data from the old database, repairing inconsistent /invalid records, removing duplicates, transforming the old data to conform to new application data requirements, translating source values to new data based on translation tables, loading the data into the new database, validating the data against business rules, and verifying the data for accuracy.

Once the old data was migrated into the new application, automatic integrity checks were performed along with random manual checks. Some customers were also invited to do the checks to ensure the integrity.

This ensured smooth transition to the new environment.

The application has been deployed across two locations to provide redundancy. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 64-bit Enterprise Edition has been integrated with to provide real time synchronous back up at Noida facility.

Benefits

Moving forward, the .NET environment gives the company the ability to develop new functionality and new presentation screens in a highly graphical format. “The .NET solution makes it easier for us to use Web services and other integration technologies to facilitate closer communications and transactions with customers and business partners,” comments Desi S Valli, ED & COO, Net4.

Improves Customer Experience

Net4 prides itself on its customer experience. There is a constant effort to improve quality of services to help improve customer satisfaction. The customers are the real beneficiaries of the improvements that this Microsoft Windows®-based architecture provides. “Customers can manage their accounts quickly and efficiently through one interface on the Web and experience new services from our product lines,” explains Valli.

Sub Second Application Response Time

“Customers are looking for millisecond response times which the Linux and MySQL was unable to cope with. We wanted our Web servers to return queries in milliseconds. This has been achieved by the new application running on SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0,” explains Desi S Valli, ED & COO, Net4.

Reduces cost of operations

The cost of operations was much higher for the Linux based solution. This was because the cost of skilled people over a period of 18 – 24 months increased the return on investment substantially. “We believe that over a 24 month period, Windows based solutions have a lower return on investment sue to lower manpower costs,” comments Valli.

Also, as a business, the high costs prohibited the business to add extra bandwidth in terms of skills. Therefore, if a person quit midstream, the development would get affected. However, Microsoft skills are easily available and far more cost effective.

Faster and Better Quality Development

One of the things that Net4 team really loved was the way they were developing the software. They have been able build an open and expandable software architecture for its e-commerce portal. The application is secure, robust, scalable and easy to use. “The .NET Framework 3.0 has built in features that offer a rapid development environment. The Windows Workflow Foundation integration with Microsoft technology saves time and money. We completed the new software application solution within 8 months with only 7 people,” elaborates Valli.

Improved Maintenance

With SQL Server and .NET, our system is more reliable and we spend less time to maintain it. Thus we do a a better job of maintenance, which heads off problems before they occur,” concludes Valli.

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0

.NET Framework 3.0 is Microsoft’s managed-code programming model for developing software on the Windows platform. It builds on the .NET Framework 2.0, combining the power of the existing .NET Framework 2.0 application programming interfaces with new technologies for building applications that provide visually stunning user experiences, seamless interoperable communications, and the ability to model a range of business processes. The .NET Framework 3.0 includes Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows CardSpace technologies. It provides a consistent and familiar development experience, bringing new technology to the millions of developers programming in managed code today.

For more information about the .NET Framework 3.0, please go to:

framework

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. “The .NET solution makes it easier for us to use Web services and other integration technologies to facilitate closer communications and transactions with customers and business partners.”

Desi S Valli, ED & COO, Net4

| |

“Customers can manage their accounts quickly and efficiently through one interface on the Web and experience new services from our product lines

Desi S Valli, ED & COO, Net4 | |

| |Software and Services

■ Products

− Microsoft SQL Server 2005 64-bit Enterprise Edition

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-bit Enterprise Edition

− Windows Vista

■ Technologies

− Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 |Hardware

■ EMC CX 300

■ Cisco CSS

■ Dell 2850 Servers

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© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published October, 2007 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Net4 products and services, call 1860 180 4444 Via BSNL/MTNL, 39891414 From other landlines and dial city code +39891414 from a mobile phone, !"+,:Mk?™ºÎÓ" 8 G H I ] ÿ • ¡¼½âüý

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or visit the Web site at: 4.in

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