Getting the right apps into the hands of your customers quickly requires an infrastructure that can handle the load. Assembling the components is tricky because there’s a combination of new data and old to manage in the moment for the best customer experience. Telecom companies like T-Mobile need to be able to handle this exponential increase in data volume, and also analyze this new source of data to deliver the right services to each customer.
Anticipating the newest mobile app is like waiting for the next blockbuster movie; it’s become a major event. With top lists of most popular apps published per month and even per week, there is a whole market around interest in apps. Ruzzle, a word game resembling Scramble, earned the top position on iPhone apps charts as the most downloaded game in January, giving us the first big hit of 2013. Of course, the runaway success story of 2012 was Snapchat, a photo-messaging app, where users were sending about 50 million snaps a day. Think about the volume of data these two apps alone are producing. It’s staggering.
Year-Ending Week is The Blockbuster Period
The last week of 2012 was the largest week for both new device activations and app downloads in iOS and Android history — a record-breaking 50 million iOS and Android devices were activated, and 1.76 billion applications were downloaded. You cannot ignore the increasing demand for fast reliable data that the mushrooming mobile apps have created. Mobile applications relying on remote data sources and databases need to transmit data through wireless media, requiring improved performance of data transmission over wireless networks.
More Apps, More Data Transmitted Every Second
Applications on mobile devices are increasingly becoming richer and generating more and more data. Consumers expect to see updated data in their apps when they open the apps on their mobile devices, which mean automatic updating of data via faster transmission of data. Throughout the wireless industry, companies are innovating to keep up with the expectations of customers.
T-Mobile USA strives to be at the forefront of those changes and is handling about 60 million transactions per day, which translates to over three billion messages being passed through the various components in the process flow. And now there are a hundred systems that are talking to each other seamlessly, massively expanding the exchange of data across systems. TIBCO messaging and integration software have been core to all this, allowing T-Mobile to expand and handle the increasing volume of data transmission.
“From a T-Mobile middleware perspective, launching a new platform like our highly regarded Android application is quick and simple because we can quickly develop the components that need to be created and integrate them with the large number that have already been built.”
— Mark Johnston, Manager – Middleware Space and Application Support, T-Mobile USA
All this data from mobile apps can be analyzed and insights gained into customers’ data behavior, enabling service providers to proactively market and deliver services that fit with the customer. So big data is set to play a starring role in the mobile apps blockbuster story, but that is a different movie for another day.
For more on how to integrate your systems to leverage Big Data, check out these Gartner reports:
Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Application Infrastructure for Systematic SOA Infrastructure Projects
To read more about the way that mobility is changing our lives at home and at work, click here.
