Red Hat recently announced that mCarbon, a product company in the Indian telecommunications sector, has partnered with Red Hat to build its software infrastructure platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Red Hat-based solution has reduced the time-to-market for mCarbon's services, thereby helping the telecommunications company increase repeat sales.

mCarbon’s key business objective is to create a niche in the telecommunications Value Added Services (VAS) and network applications space by building innovative telecommunications products that can increase user adoption towards VAS. mCarbon works with top operator customers such as Airtel, Idea Cellular, Tata Teleservices, MTS, BSNL in addition to large enterprise customers such as State Bank of India, Bank of India, ICICI Lombard and Infosys, offering them compelling services around telecommunications.

In an effort to bridge the gap between end users and telecommunications operators, mCarbon wanted to build a multi-architecture platform that would operate in a distributed mode with the capability to handle multiple technologies and disparate systems.

In addition, the new delivery platform for network applications required intelligent call control, multi-access user controls for applications, such as SMS Center, USSD Gateway and Interactive Voice Response (IVR). It also needed a comprehensive charging framework to handle protocol and customer charging scenarios, while also meeting a strict cost-to-performance ratio with high scalability potential and future readiness.

“We call this framework ‘Greenroom' and we wanted to design the product platform in such a way that a majority of the components could be reused,” said Brij Mohan Mahendru, chief technology officer at mCarbon.

In order to meet its IT infrastructure criteria, mCarbon decided to build the underlying platform for its mission-critical Greenroom application on open source technology, and ultimately chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its base platform. “Our primary reason for choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the cost-to-performance ratio and the stability it offers,” said Mahendru.

mCarbon built its flagship Greenroom framework entirely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM  System x servers. It also uses the power of Red Hat's clustering technologies for a failover cluster for its framework. One of the applications deployed on the Greenroom framework is the automated voicemail application. 

The Red Hat-based framework has helped mCarbon’s voicemail application handle a steep increase in Busy Hour Call Attempts (BHCA) from 200,000 to about 500,000 in just two years without any drop in performance -- a testament to the platform’s stability and scalability in combination with IBM System x servers.

Such an increase in performance has contributed to a reduction in IT infrastructure costs. The flexibility and freedom from lock-in advantages of Red Hat have helped mCarbon to achieve substantial longevity for its framework.

“The entire platform is designed with reusability as the key component, so as to support multiple vendors,” said Mahendru. “The platform is designed in such a way as to reuse 90 percent of the components.”

“Our partnership with Red Hat has enabled us to offer a more robust, scalable, high-performance, flexible and cost-effective technology platform to our customers. It has helped us to deliver scalable technology solutions that drive telecommunications innovation,” said Mahendru.