Hungama Deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux And Red Hat JBoss Middleware

Red Hat, Inc., the provider of open source solutions, has announced that Hungama Digital Media Entertainment, the aggregator, developer, publisher and distributor of Hindi language (Bollywood) films and South-Asian entertainment content, has selected Red Hat for its new platform solution to deliver value-added services with a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

Hungama wanted to provide managed services for content providers and telecommunications (telecom) companies for their value-added services (VAS) management. One of its clients — a large, new European telecom— offers affordable mobile services to communities across India.

The company’s existing middleware could not keep up with the new demands and exponential growth. In today’s highly competitive telecom industry, Hungama needed to not only scale out to meet the needs of millions of subscribers, but must also quickly deploy applications to help attract and retain customers.

“There are many reasons why we chose the Red Hat solution. Red Hat solutions are well-known and have proven performance benchmarks and customer acceptance. Our other technology teams have successfully deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux in other projects so it was not entirely new to us,” said Amit Vora, CTO, Hungama Digital Media Entertainment.

The Red Hat solution includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and an open source, asynchronous high-performance messaging system. These elements form the core of the company’s new global delivery platform (GDP), which is used to manage value-added services (VAS). Hungama customised the solution to integrate with the telecom operator’s systems.

A key benefit of the new set up is its scalability. The previous architecture could not scale to meet the expansion plans. The new implementation is designed to be horizontally scalable and is capable of supporting many more customers simply by adding more hardware.

The telecom operator can now deliver new and modified services faster and better, with a shorter time to market. Customers can access services far more efficiently through the service layer used by the VAS and content providers to add new products very quickly compared to previous solutions.

The total cost of the new solution is 10 percent of the total cost of the previous solution. By adopting a revenue sharing model with Hungama, which built the infrastructure and manages the applications, the European telecom operator has achieved a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO).