Dial, Listen, Play on the Cloud

Summary:

A whole new breed of innovative startups are using the efficiencies and flexibility of cloud-based business models to bring solutions and services never heard before. Here’s one.

Organization: Dialify Technologies are the pioneers of audio gaming in India. That’s right, audio gaming. For a cricket crazy country like India they have made it possible for fans to dial and play cricket on their phones, without having to download any application. Pretty innovative.

Here’s why audio gaming, as strange as the idea sounds, makes sense: India boasts of over 800 million mobile subscribers, but less than 2 percent of them can run mobile applications. Voice continues to drive 95 percent of the revenue of telecom operators.

By going on to the cloud, we are able to deploy our applications to new markets within a week in most cases, whereas in a more traditional physical infrastructure rollout this would have taken months

Dialify, founded by Nikhil Soman, is a telecom applications company which started in 2009 and is determined to create new ways to use voice telephony. The start-up’s product is a game engine that enables the delivery of multiple types of games using a phone call. These games accept speech and DTMF (DTMF is the telecom equivalent of keyboard input in PC’s.) as input while generating a stream of audio and sound effects as output.

 “Our game engine supports multiple types of games, ranging from single player PvS, PvP to multi-player PvP mode in both collaborative and turn-based methods,” explains Soman, who was also part of the technology team behind BigAdda and Zapak. PvS & PvP stand for “Player vs System” & “Player vs Player” respectively. Most games are built for PvS game play where the System is the opponent, and Players compete by trying to outdo their own score against the system. In PvP gameplay, the Game Engine enables both Players to play against each other and transmits moves/player actions from Player 1 to Player 2 and vice versa.

 Currently, Dialify Technologies has a partnership with Reliance Communications to deliver its first audio game called Cwicket.

 Business case: If telecom players could find a way to use voice to run applications like games, ARPUs should logically increase. But why are voice-based services so uncommon in India? Geographical disparity and infrastructure are probably to blame. Traditionally, deployments of voice-based services in India have been based on how licenses are handed out: geographically and largely contiguous with each state having one telecom service area.

 These service areas are also loosely associated with language distribution. As a result, voice services are usually deployed locally to each service area. An IVR meant for Maharashtra, for example, can’t be plugged into Karnataka. This leads to a large-scale fragmentation of resources leading to high deployment costs –and consequently lower ROI for operators.

 Dialify uses existing infrastructure of the Operator and provides a Cloud Hosted Game Engine on AWS platform, that only requires the Operator to provision Internet Access from their switch. We operate our games over a variety of carrier technologies, including SIP & SS7 signaling. In case of SIP we are able to do a end-to-end Cloud based delivery. 

 More critically for Dialify, this set up makes cross-operator services almost impossible to deliver. So players on one telecom network can’t play against opponents on another network.

 Project: Dailify belongs to a new breed of innovative startups built on the cloud. “Going on the cloud (AWS) enables us to create deployment models by enabling custom images or instances with specific configurations to handle closely-coupled systems like SDP integrations and billing gateways while at the same time aggregating databases over Amazon Relational Database Service instances to maintain the cross-operator multi-player features that create a unique experience for end users. Considering that Dialify is a three-person company, minimum effort in deploying and maintaining platforms across multiple large service providers is extremely critical,” explains Soman.

 First Steps: Some of the early challenges the company faced was connecting their game engines built on AWS cloud with the telecom network equipment. “We overcame this by learning how to creatively and effectively leverage some of AWS’ tools and features so that we could configure them with telecom equipment. This inherent flexibility is the core benefit in moving to AWS,” says Soman.

 Benefits: Our applications are the first movers in the segment and building awareness and driving sampling remains our highest priority,” says Soman.

 For startups operating margins are always a focus area. By standardizing on AWS, Dailify was able to provide its service to carriers and consumers at significantly low costs, leading to higher adoption numbers.

 “We have been able to sustain operations over the past two quarters, without having to expand our team. Time-to-market-wise, we are able to deploy our applications to new markets within a week in most cases, whereas in a more traditional physical infrastructure rollout this would have taken months! “

 A strong proponent of cloud computing Soman believes that, “the cloud is the easiest way to set up geographically distributed technology infrastructure. And browser-based console enables the management of this entire multiplex from wherever you please, I see no reason why you wouldn’t want to commit to that.”

By going on to the cloud, we are able to deploy our applications to new markets within a week in most cases, whereas in a more traditional physical infrastructure rollout this would have taken months