Client Stories

Emerging Markets Telecommunication Services Ltd. (EMTS), trading as ‘9mobile, is a Nigerian private limited liability company. 9Mobile operates a Unified Access Service License that enables her provide Fixed Telephony, Digital Mobile Services, International Gateway Services, National and Regional Long-Distance Services in addition to spectrum assignments in the 900 and 1800 MHz bands. In its 9 years of operation, and with a growing customer base of over 21m, 9mobile has built up state-of-the-art telecom infrastructure and taken a leadership position of innovation and quality among mobile network operators in Nigeria. With the launch of 4G LTE, 9mobile is poised to drive the future of technology in Nigeria through the delivery of high speed data and quality voice services that will enable customers on its network to do more. The determination to maintain the lead in using technology to drive innovation, optimize customer experience and continuously differentiate the brand from Competition, led to a broad and intentional search for a robust, secure, cost effective and Agile Cloud Platform for delivering Modern Business Application Capabilities. SERCOM is 9Mobile’s service integration platform which integrates with 3rd party Value added Services providers to offer a variety of services, including but not limited to, charging, authentication, Short Messaging Services (SMS) and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) services. At the same time, it shields 9Mobile backend systems such as Online Charging System (OCS) and SMSC from unauthorized access and excessive traffic from 3rd parties. With the growing Customer demand for digital media and other value-added services, it became necessary to re-design and upgrade the SERCOM product application delivery platform. As strategic Microsoft Partner in the country, Wragby Business Solutions brought to bear our competencies as the first Cloud Gold Platform Partner and adapted the Infrastructure and Platform services available on Azure to resolve 9Mobile’s problem thereby eliminating losses, lowering operational costs, increasing performance, agility, scalability and Return of Investment.

Thus, 9mobile’s transformational journey to Azure began. We began by providing a clear-cut roadmap for application modernization, leveraging Azure IaaS and PaaS Services in a purely OSS (Open Source Software) environment. A Hyper Scale Infrastructure was designed and deployed comprising of both IaaS and PaaS Services namely: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set, Azure Storage Queues, Azure Redis Cache and Azure API Manager as the new environment for SERCOM, the first of its kind in Africa. Within hours from Go-Live on Azure, there came a breath of fresh life to SERCOM. The well sized instances of the OSS Virtual Machines on Azure could now handle the once overwhelming application load and scale automatically from a count of 2 to 40. Additionally, SERCOM’s API Economy experienced a resurgence with the ability of the Azure API Manager to scale up to 42 Million calls per day. the transformation significantly helped re-write 9mobile’s story and within days, the financial revenue hemorrhage that once plagued the SERCOM Service had been fully curtailed with a scalable capacity to offer reliable services to both existing and new subscribers. With the deployment of the transformed SERCOM application on Azure, 9Mobile expects to realize over 400% growth in additional incremental revenues over the first 18 months. As a committed Microsoft Partner and Cloud Platform Pioneer, Wragby Business Solutions and Technologies Limited is championing replicating this differentiated solution in the industry and actively driving deeper co-engagement with Microsoft and other customers.