Medio's SaaS Offering Turbo-charged by Absolute Performance
The early days of cell phone browsing left a bit too much to be desired. Anemic bandwidth and screen limitations – not to mention trying to force 100 square inches of information into a three-inch-square screen -- sent most users running back to their laptops.
Fast forward. The cell phones and networks of today are vastly improved in capability and performance. The only remaining bridge to cross has been the recognition that even a higher resolution, larger mobile screen is still vastly smaller than a laptop or desktop screen.
Built for mobility
That’s where Medio Systems comes in. A company built to deliver a rewarding search experience as well as targeted advertising and merchandising to mobile phone users, Medio has turned the limitations of the platform into a competitive advantage using proprietary search technology that delivers exactly the right content to the mobile user with amazing efficiency and in a format that is exactly right for the individual device.
That has enabled Medio’s wireless carrier partners such as Verizon and T-Mobile to continue to excel in providing the best end-user experiences, while growing not only their search services but also their revenues from search-related advertising and content sales.
Founded in 2003, the company launched its first customer – Telus, one of Canada’s largest wireless carriers – in 2005. At the time Medio had eight employees. Telus had more than 20,000. Medio had revenues of zero. Telus had $8 billion, much of that from over 4 million wireless subscribers.
Question: how does a clever and feisty company of eight roll out a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering to a potential four million subscribers practically overnight (actually, in 30 days) and without a hitch?
Answer: with a partner that already has a full-fledged services platform in place. That would be Absolute Performance, Inc.
Tom Schill, Medio employee number eight, is Vice President of Network Operations:
“It was a simple decision, really. We needed to be able to run the system 24/7, meeting the high service level expectations of our customer. That "We needed to be able to run the system 24/7, meeting the high service level expectations of our customer." Tom Schill meant performance monitoring and management as well as the ability to quickly diagnose issues before they interfered with the end-user experience.A make or buy decision
“For us to do that day one would have required building a network operations center, hiring as many as a dozen people to staff it, and licensing performance management software for $50,000 and more (not including maintenance). I calculated a cost of more than half a million dollars in the first year. As a start-up with only so much funding, that just didn’t work.
Absolute Performance had the performance management tools we needed in the form of their System Shepherd software.
"They had a delivery platform and a services model that enabled us to start small with them and grow step by step." Tom Schill
“We looked at a variety of performance management solutions, such as HP OpenView, that could have met our needs, but none came with a delivery model that made sense to us.
“Absolute Performance had the performance management tools we needed in the form of their System Shepherd software. Equally important, they had a SaaS delivery platform for the tools, and an IT operations support model that enabled us to start small and grow step by step,” Schill said.
And grow they have. Two years later, the Medio platform is serving 116 million potential wireless users in North America and Europe. The virtualized platform is running in six data centers – two each in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. The company is at 130 employees and growing, but still none in the network operations center. That’s Absolute Performance’s job.
Focus on growth
"Having a partner with the skill set to potentially take on more and more operations challenges such as these is a real luxury, and remains a significant cost benefit to us. " Tom Schill
Schill again: “API frees us to concentrate on areas where our people can add the most value. With a large, growing and demanding customer roster, that means areas like software and business development.”
With the growth of those applications, Schill’s team of engineers has its hands full keeping up with cascading code revisions and deploying them artfully to Medio’s server farms. What he would really like to see, however, is more of that kind of work offloaded so his team can concentrate more strategically on architecting tier 3 functions and the next level of hardware.
“Having a partner with the skill set to potentially take on more and more operations challenges such as these is a real luxury, and remains a significant cost benefit to us,” Schill added.
The ever changing and highly sophisticated Medio offering does things that no other mobile platform can do. It is about delivering answers to a mobile screen, not lists of links leading to more links. It is even about formatting the information to fit the exact screen size of the individual handset, whether it is a Motorola Razr or a Blackberry Pearl.
And, of course, it is all relevant – whether the user is searching for ringtones in their favorite genre or a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan.
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing fast – and right
Behind this genius is a talented team of programmers who believe that if anything can be done, it should be done now. And if done now, it should be deployed yesterday.
Day one Schill saw one of his principle challenges as being to deliver this genius to end customers, but to do so in a way that assured rock-solid quality and stability – not always a top of mind item for coders.
To do this he brought his big data center experience into play to institute the ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) framework of best practices for IT services delivery. ITIL discipline has proven a powerful approach for Medio as well as a necessary element in its appeal to European customers. Not surprisingly, Medio is working with a delivery partner in Absolute Performance that is also ITIL compliant.
What does it mean to Schill to have the Absolute Performance team working for him?
“In short, it means I can sleep at night,” he said. And he means that quite literally.
