The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

All 950 million mobile phones sold around the world in 2006 had the ability to access the internet. Mobilizing web content and applications for this potential user base has become increasingly important.

Usablenet’s Mobile solution was designed with exactly this trend in mind. It is a complete solution, which enables the organizations that use it to provide mobile web access to their users. Usablenet Mobile creates a view of existing web content and services that are specialized for viewing by users of all PDAs, including Blackberry and Treo, as well as web-based mobile phones.

The Challenge

Usablenet wanted to expand its mobile service in order to meet the increasing demands of its customers, including a number of high profile organizations. The aim was to maximize Usablenet’s connection capacity in order to support the mobile sites of its growing major brand customers.

Zeus Technology was brought in to help on the basis of its previous track record in enhancing the availability and responsiveness of high-profile web sites. The challenge for Usablenet was to transfer its system seamlessly, which included several servers for different clients using various technologies, to a more uniform platform with ZXTM (Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager) so that the customers would not realize the transition had been made.

The Solution

ZXTM is a programmable Application Traffic Manager that inspects, transforms and routes requests as it intelligently load balances them across the application infrastructure. It is uniquely available as hardware, software or a virtual appliance. ZXTM was deployed for Usablenet on clusters of Dual Processor Xeon servers, grouped in clusters of eight and hosted in multiple locations across Europe and North America.

Although hardware from other providers was considered, Zeus was selected on the basis of its reputation, ease of testing and installation of the hardware, and quality of support.

Unlike proprietary hardware appliances, ZXTM runs on standard server hardware, and licenses can be transferred onto faster machines when they become available.

The results

ZXTM has boosted performance to enable the Usablenet Mobile service to handle in the region of 200,000 mobile users per hour at its current configuration. Usablenet was especially impressed with the smooth deployment of ZXTM.

Jason Taylor, Director of Mobile Solutions, Usablenet, explains that, “Zeus has allowed us to grow rapidly and expand our Mobile service with no impact to our clients, or their clients, who want to access key services on mobile devices.

“The ZXTM solution has been absolutely perfect for our business, we are extremely pleased with the increase in productivity it has afforded us. Zeus also provided fast and effective support while we were deploying the solution. We have been very impressed with the overall results.”