Leading Mobile Payments Provider ZONG Leans on JAMS During Company’s Rapid Growth

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Zong (www.zong.com) is a leader in mobile payments for online games and social networks. Zong’s payment platform lets you buy goods from these games and social networks through your mobile phone – items you purchase are added to your phone bill or deducted from your prepaid plan. Zong operates in over 40 countries, and connects to more than 240 mobile carriers. Over the past decade, Zong has processed payments for over 30 million people. In August 2011, Zong was acquired by PayPal.

THE CHALLENGES

Prior to implementing JAMS, Zong relied heavily on native operating system tools like Windows Task Scheduler and SQL Server Agent to run a variety of processes, scripts and maintenance jobs across dozens of servers. One of the main issues that Zong faced was that there was no centralized control or management of these processes. Zong also had no way of being notified if remote jobs failed. IT Administrators would arrive in the morning to find that jobs did not complete successfully during the overnight batch run or jobs didn’t run at all.

As Zong’s platform was adopted by hundreds of carriers, the company grew very quickly and it became apparent that the company needed to implement a centralized job scheduling solution. The company began a search for an enterprise scheduling tool that supported job dependency triggers, auditing and roll back features, Windows PowerShell, and a comprehensive alerting mechanism. Zong considered a number of commercial and open source solutions before discovering JAMS during a web search.

THE SOLUTIONS

With JAMS in place, Zong now has a disciplined, methodical approach to batch processing. The execution of all scripts and processes is controlled by the centralized JAMS Scheduler. By running a JAMS deploy job, JAMS Agents are deployed across dozens of servers. The central JAMS Scheduler orchestrates and coordinates which jobs run on which JAMS Agents. Job dependencies are resolved between servers and applications and alerts are triggered when jobs fail, run too long or run too fast.

“Having JAMS manage all of our processes and scripts that run across dozens of servers makes it very easy to solve production issues,” states Claudio Panteghini, IT Administrator at Zong. “When a job fails or is not executed on time on a remote server, we know immediately and quickly solve the problem.”

THE BENEFITS

“We are experiencing less downtime and becoming more efficient with JAMS in place,” adds Claudio. “Whenever we have questions, their support department is quick to respond. We have been using JAMS for more than two years now and we continue to be impressed with the number of new features and capabilities they add with each new release. We are an extremely happy client.”