CIOs trying to expand services globally should take an extended, hard examine WhatsApp’s strategy, growth, and acquisition.
Let’s face it: Delivering reliable service to 250 million people an afternoon over the worldwide Internet isn’t an engineering challenge most CIOs should cope with. But when your small business should tap the potential for the worldwide consumer market, you’ll likely serve customers in lots of of a similar high-growth markets where WhatsApp built their audience: countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Turkey, and Russia.
Like WhatsApp, you will be counting on some unfamiliar service providers in each of these countries to give international and last-mile connectivity in your customers. And as you will soon realize, whether you’re blamed for his or her poor and unpredictable Internet performance is dependent upon a number of key infrastructure design choices up front.
[Facebook’s $19 billion deal to purchase WhatsApp may raise eyebrows, but it is a good move. Read Facebook Acquires WhatsApp: 3 Key Benefits]
Smart CIOs who’re planning for global service expansion might dispose of among the following lessons from WhatsApp’s successful design, growth, and $16 billion exit.
Understand the parameters of your service delivery requirements
The WhatsApp founders were careful to realise what they can escape with by designing a lean service delivery infrastructure. They selected to deliver value within a service model (international SMS) that may easily tolerate hundreds of milliseconds of lightspeed delays. That allowed WhatsApp to take infrastructure risks that might not be tolerable for a more interactive service with harder real-time constraints, like Skype.
Now that WhatsApp has announced the rollout of real-time voice chat in an upcoming release, those initial assumptions may not hold. Carrying both ends of a voice call halfway all over the world is problematic due to speed of sunshine delays and the issue of maintaining clean, reliable, low-loss Internet paths for traffic between, say, India and Washington, DC. That’s a great segue to the subsequent lesson.
Your global deployment strategy will change over time
From the start, WhatsApp decided to host their service within the United states of america, a rustic with cheap power, cheap wholesale Internet, and virtually nonexistent government regulation of content services. They were ready to prove their value available in the market, and grow, by paying one reliable local transit provider and counting on the web to deliver their service all over the world.
WhatsApp’s backend infrastructure is “classic American cloud” — concentrated, scalable, locally reliable, but located at the wrong side of the planet for too many users, across an extended-haul Internet that’s fragile, slow, and unpredictable.
WhatsApp serves content from a comparatively small handful of Rackspace IP addresses in northern Virginia. To go beyond the straightforward messaging model, WhatsApp had to discover a partner that knew how one can deploy global infrastructure, to get the bits toward the users (enter Facebook and Akamai).
The global roadmap is changing; pick your battles carefully
If you follow in WhatsApp’s footsteps, you’re more likely to encounter unfriendly national Internet regulatory environments in places like China, where local datacenter presence (employing staff, paying taxes, observing local laws) has become a demand to access the local market.
If WhatsApp had chosen to tackle TenCent’s WeChat in China, they’d probably have established a second datacenter presence there, a method already used today by services corresponding to Evernote. Where China is today, Brazil can be tomorrow, and Turkey the day after. Be prepared to work more closely with (or at the least hear the troubles of) the governments of a few of the most important and leading consumer growth markets.
Get to grasp your audience, and their favorite Internet service providers, in intimate detail
If your goal is to play down latency and improve reliable access to the shoppers of China Mobile, or Turkcell, or Brazil’s Vivo, there are particular international carriers you will want to access, specific cities through which to host your content, or even specific facilities you want to lease space in.
Find out what those are and make your technical plans for Internet connectivity appropriately. Have to learn more? Enterprises that desire to understand global networking are finding their method to the network operator technical community meetings, comparable to NANOG, RIPE, and APRICOT. Get to understand the worldwide network operators who may be critical to the experience of your far-flung Internet customers.
Ask hard questions on global network strategy during mergers and acquisitions
The ability to serve a worldwide audience creates an entire new sequence of technical conversations that are looking to happen during initial diligence.
A company that cares about Internet performance and user experience must have detailed measurements of the performance in their Internet paths to customers, and a resounding story about how their Internet provider relationships and selection of facilities support their business goals. a straightforward strategy like WhatsApp’s needn’t be a red flag if it’s in keeping with their customers’ geographic footprint and repair performance requirements.
Embrace the challenges of worldwide Internet service delivery
There’s never been a higher time to head global. Cheap, ubiquitous virtualization technology, coupled with new datacenter capacity coming online in nearly every country, make it cheaper and easier to take parts of your offering off-shore.
Take good thing about this trend, either directly or through a content distribution partner, and move no less than a number of your content from your home market. The client experience payoff will are available in the shape of lower latencies and more stable connectivity, two key competitive advantages within the crowded global market for Internet-delivered services.
If Facebook hadn’t come along just in time, WhatsApp, too, would have needed to reinvent itself as a real global service delivery company.
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Jim Cowie, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, is accountable for innovation and technology strategy for Renesys. His recent work specializes in the structure, dynamics, and economics of the web and its utility as a world service delivery platform. Jim has more … View Full Bio
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