Vishwak Solutions develops End-to-End SMS based Content Delivery System for MSN India & Hutchinson Essar

Hutchinson Essar, one of India’s leading mobile service providers has recently launched Funcard, a unique value added service for its mobile users in partnership with Microsoft. Hutch’s Funcards are sold through retail outlets for different bundle of monotones and caller tunes of popular film songs. The Funcards, which are just like pre-paid scratch cards, have a 16-digit PIN number that the mobile users send to Hutch via SMS. Hutch aimed at leveraging the strength of its strong subscribers base of young mobile users in order to increase the revenue from its value added services.

Microsoft & Hutch wanted to partner with a mobile technology company to generate PINs for each of its several (over 16) telecom circles across the country on demand. Hutch designed the content plan for monotone and caller tune bundles of popular films of each geographic and linguistic regions. The company planned to outsource generation, validation of PIN cards as well as content delivery based on SMS requests from users.

Microsoft selected Vishwak Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and one of India’s leading mobile technology solutions companies. The prime factor that tilted the scale in favour of Vishwak was the ongoing relationship it had with Hutch on various mobile and portal solutions.

For the initial launch, Vishwak generated over several million PINs for different product bundles for all of Hutch’s telecom circles. The PINs, which were generated randomly to ensure that key numbers are not repeated, were printed in Funcards and despatched to different markets. Vishwak configured product bundles and stored them in its secured database.

Using .Net Framework 2.0, Vishwak developed an SMS-based Content Delivery System (SCDS) that would interface with Hutch’s SMS gateway that handles mobile users’ requests. Vishwak automated the entire process that starts from generation of PINs to access of mobile users’ request to validation of both PINs and mobile numbers.

Vishwak used Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for data storage and MS-Message Queue (MSMQ) service, responsible for validating SMS requests. Upon successful validation, Vishwak’s SCDS would send a confirmation message and relevant products to the mobile users via Hutch’s SMS Gateway.

Vishwak set up the entire array of dedicated servers that are deployed at VSNL Data Centre, Chennai and formed a 24/7 support team for this project in record time of 2 weeks.