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Searching high and low for middleware: Tata Sky bets on JBoss
In recent years, it has become common for large enterprises to shy away from building in-house solutions in favour of outsourcing to third-party providers. Many today, like Tata Sky - one of India’s largest direct broadcast satellite television (DTH) providers - are opting for open-source products, and outsourcing customisation and maintenance.
Tata Sky decided to replacement its previous proprietary middleware platform with Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a simple matter of expediency. With its current proprietary platform reaching its end-of-life and its customer base rapidly expanding, Tata Sky needed a platform that was reliable, scalable and cost effective, which they found Red Hat could provide.
Companies in the Tata Group – which Tata Sky is part of – have been active in partnering with open-source companies in general, and Red Hat in particular. In 2013, Red Hat gave Tata Consultancy Services, another company in the group, its “North America System Integrator Partner of the Year” award, publicly recognizing the long association and the close relationship between the two.
Incorporated in 2004 as a joint venture between Tata Group and 21st Century Fox, Tata Sky was launched in 2006 and has since become India’s leading DTH operator.
The Need to Deliver
According to its Chief Information Officer, N. Ravishanker, the company now has a customer base of 15 million subscribers. Its current middleware platform, a proprietary system known as the Electronic Voucher Distribution (EVD), handles approximately 500,000 transactions per day, with the number set to increase to 1 million transactions per day in the next 3 to 5 years.
With such a massive subscriber base, Ravishanker stresses Tata Sky’s need for flexibility and seamless delivery.
“Our primary IT responsibility is to ensure that we offer the flexibility to launch products and services with ease in a shorter time frame. Secondly, with a large subscriber base, it’s vital that we support the business and customers twenty-four seven, and provide a seamless service,” he explained.
Searching for a Solution
Bearing this in mind, the company had a choice of either upgrading its EVD – a costly and difficult task – or switching to a new, standardized middleware platform. After much research and testing, the company found Red Hat’s JBoss the ideal platform in terms of cost, flexibility and scalability
Prior to this, they had already been extensively using other open source solutions, including Red Hat JBoss, for what mission critical workloads.
According to Ravishanker, Tata Sky’s experience with open source has been a positive one, leading the company to consider increasing its reliance on open source solutions.
“We have no concerns. In fact, it (open source) is better than any OEM based product, and we would like to expand the footprint.”
A Successful Migration
Because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform - like with most other open source implementation options - comes with a subscription option and paid support for large enterprises, Tata Sky’s migration has been a familiar and smooth one.
As Red Hat’s subscription option allows companies to seek support and collaboration from both Red Hat and the online open source community, migration does not have to be a solo effort. In addition, for the specific purposes of this migration, Tata Sky engaged Red Hat Global Professional Services, which provides consulting and technical support.
“Red Hat GPS has given us full support in the migration process in terms of effort estimation, application readiness testing, and issue resolution,” said Ravishanker.
The migration was completed in four months, purportedly without any disruption to Tata Sky’s services. As JBoss integrated easily with Tata Sky’s key billing and communication applications, the transition was stable and seamless.
Reducing Cost
With JBoss, Tata Sky has already seen massive reduction in operating cost. Database costs alone have decreased by 75%, by reducing the necessary proprietary cores from 120 to 30. Additionally, it hopes to reduce middleware license and maintenance costs by up to 90% in the near future.
Part of the ability to reduce cost is Red Hat’s predictability – using the subscription model, Tata Sky can now estimate its yearly costs with greater accuracy.
Said Ravishanker, “We like the simplified subscription model of Red Hat as we always know how much the software will cost on a yearly basis.”
Getting Ready for the Next Steps
Along with massive cost reductions, JBoss has also proven to be more efficient than Tata Sky’s previous platform. By combining JBoss and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, Tata Sky claims to have seen a twofold increase in performance, giving it room to handle up to 2 million transactions a day.
Moreover, as JBoss is extremely scalable, Tata Sky is confident that they will be able to meet future performance requirements – so confident, in fact, that they plan to migrate more of their in-house applications to JBoss.
As for other technological developments in Tata Sky’s near future, Ravishanker reveals, “Real time analytics and cognitive computing are areas we are heading towards.”
http://enterpriseinnovation.net/article/searching-high-and-low-middleware-tata-sky-bets-jboss-1525816777
In recent years, it has become common for large enterprises to shy away from building in-house solutions in favour of outsourcing to third-party providers. Many today, like Tata Sky - one of India’s largest direct broadcast satellite television (DTH) providers - are opting for open-source products, and outsourcing customisation and maintenance.
Tata Sky decided to replacement its previous proprietary middleware platform with Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a simple matter of expediency. With its current proprietary platform reaching its end-of-life and its customer base rapidly expanding, Tata Sky needed a platform that was reliable, scalable and cost effective, which they found Red Hat could provide.
Companies in the Tata Group – which Tata Sky is part of – have been active in partnering with open-source companies in general, and Red Hat in particular. In 2013, Red Hat gave Tata Consultancy Services, another company in the group, its “North America System Integrator Partner of the Year” award, publicly recognizing the long association and the close relationship between the two.
Incorporated in 2004 as a joint venture between Tata Group and 21st Century Fox, Tata Sky was launched in 2006 and has since become India’s leading DTH operator.
The Need to Deliver
According to its Chief Information Officer, N. Ravishanker, the company now has a customer base of 15 million subscribers. Its current middleware platform, a proprietary system known as the Electronic Voucher Distribution (EVD), handles approximately 500,000 transactions per day, with the number set to increase to 1 million transactions per day in the next 3 to 5 years.
With such a massive subscriber base, Ravishanker stresses Tata Sky’s need for flexibility and seamless delivery.
“Our primary IT responsibility is to ensure that we offer the flexibility to launch products and services with ease in a shorter time frame. Secondly, with a large subscriber base, it’s vital that we support the business and customers twenty-four seven, and provide a seamless service,” he explained.
Searching for a Solution
Bearing this in mind, the company had a choice of either upgrading its EVD – a costly and difficult task – or switching to a new, standardized middleware platform. After much research and testing, the company found Red Hat’s JBoss the ideal platform in terms of cost, flexibility and scalability
Prior to this, they had already been extensively using other open source solutions, including Red Hat JBoss, for what mission critical workloads.
According to Ravishanker, Tata Sky’s experience with open source has been a positive one, leading the company to consider increasing its reliance on open source solutions.
“We have no concerns. In fact, it (open source) is better than any OEM based product, and we would like to expand the footprint.”
A Successful Migration
Because the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform - like with most other open source implementation options - comes with a subscription option and paid support for large enterprises, Tata Sky’s migration has been a familiar and smooth one.
As Red Hat’s subscription option allows companies to seek support and collaboration from both Red Hat and the online open source community, migration does not have to be a solo effort. In addition, for the specific purposes of this migration, Tata Sky engaged Red Hat Global Professional Services, which provides consulting and technical support.
“Red Hat GPS has given us full support in the migration process in terms of effort estimation, application readiness testing, and issue resolution,” said Ravishanker.
The migration was completed in four months, purportedly without any disruption to Tata Sky’s services. As JBoss integrated easily with Tata Sky’s key billing and communication applications, the transition was stable and seamless.
Reducing Cost
With JBoss, Tata Sky has already seen massive reduction in operating cost. Database costs alone have decreased by 75%, by reducing the necessary proprietary cores from 120 to 30. Additionally, it hopes to reduce middleware license and maintenance costs by up to 90% in the near future.
Part of the ability to reduce cost is Red Hat’s predictability – using the subscription model, Tata Sky can now estimate its yearly costs with greater accuracy.
Said Ravishanker, “We like the simplified subscription model of Red Hat as we always know how much the software will cost on a yearly basis.”
Getting Ready for the Next Steps
Along with massive cost reductions, JBoss has also proven to be more efficient than Tata Sky’s previous platform. By combining JBoss and Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, Tata Sky claims to have seen a twofold increase in performance, giving it room to handle up to 2 million transactions a day.
Moreover, as JBoss is extremely scalable, Tata Sky is confident that they will be able to meet future performance requirements – so confident, in fact, that they plan to migrate more of their in-house applications to JBoss.
As for other technological developments in Tata Sky’s near future, Ravishanker reveals, “Real time analytics and cognitive computing are areas we are heading towards.”
http://enterpriseinnovation.net/article/searching-high-and-low-middleware-tata-sky-bets-jboss-1525816777
