a GSMA certified Open Connectivity SMS Hub and Roaming Broker, working closely with worldwide mobile operators to facilitate the international flow of data, voice and SMS across global markets. With its innovative solutions, professional customer service and a long-lasting thirst for improvement, Monty Mobile has grown into a key regional player in the telecommunications business, gathering under its portfolio some of the biggest mobile operators and service providers around the world.

Cloud-first Future Transformation

UK-headquartered Monty Mobile is a telecommunications solutions provider and international SMS wholesale intermediary hub. It works closely with worldwide mobile operators, aggregators, and enterprises to facilitate the international flow of voice and SMS services across global markets.
The company needed to change its outdated technology to deliver on its vision and plans for creating new products and services to compete with younger, cloud-native businesses. It was using a technology stack originally set up in the 1990s, which had been added to and altered over the years.

The solution was to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) and work with AWS Advanced Consulting Partner Zero&One to help Monty Mobile’s leadership embrace digital transformation and achieve benefits with new cloud-based technology.
Before using AWS, Monty Mobile operated colocated sites in the UK and Germany, where the company hosted its SMS and other value-added services on its own hardware. Due to its legacy systems and setup, parts of the business were becoming complicated and time-consuming to manage, which was eroding profitability. For example, when it came to selling its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, Monty Mobile had to order hardware through a separate procurement process for each customer, wait for delivery, and then configure—a process that typically took 2 months.

A Partner for the Journey

Zero&One helped Monty Mobile feel comfortable with the plan to migrate to AWS by providing a vision and meticulous preparation. This enabled Monty Mobile to transform and innovate while ensuring the continuity of its existing services.

The engagement with Zero&One started in 2018. Launching a discrete project smoothly and successfully strengthened the drive for the full migration to the cloud that Zero&One had suggested. Early discussions focused on the network, hybrid model, and landing zone, with parallel streams of work around planning and troubleshooting—for example, bottlenecks between the firewalls, routers, and the data center. Zero&One also conducted a cost-benefit analysis which it presented to Monty Mobile’s leadership to support the strategy of migrating to the cloud. The plan took the careful, methodical approach that Monty Mobile favors for such programs.

Monty Mobile has launched more than 20 products since the initial engagement, and services have never paused for its customers. During this time, working with Zero&One and using AWS the company reimagined and modernized its business processes and technology systems. It went from an on-premises, legacy IT estate to a cloud-native business using services including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed container service, and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL , which enables companies to easily set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud.

Immediate Revenue Gains

One of Monty Mobile’s main services, B-Pal, is a multi-tenant short message service (SMS) gateway, which was previously based on on-premises servers. Onboarding new customers meant the company had to create new virtual machines (VMs), install Windows servers, connect an active directory, run specific configurations, and more.

The process was an administrative, capital expenditure, and procurement burden, meaning Monty Mobile had to plan, buy, and install servers, and customers had to wait before they could run their own businesses. “On the old system, it was taking 8 hours to provision the service for new customers,” says Jaber, “creating virtual machines, installing operating systems and apps, provisioning networking and firewalls. On AWS it only takes 1 hour and we are able to demonstrate the service to potential customers thorough proof-of-concept models.”

In the process of migrating to AWS, B-Pal has been reconfigured and revolutionized from top to bottom. Zero&One and AWS made recommendations for best practice and adoption. Now, B-Pal is hosted on AWS container services in the cloud. Databases have been migrated from Microsoft SQL servers to Amazon RDS, and all are managed from a single interface. Onboarding of a customer can take place in minutes. With the new AWS setup in place, Monty Mobile’s B-Pal revenues increased by 40–45 percent in an 8 month period. The new setup has also driven innovation for the company—for example, introducing video streaming that categorizes URLs in relation to parental controls.

Confidence and Assurance for Change

Some of Monty Mobile’s core systems worked on short-message peer-to-peer (SMPP) protocol, which is less common than it once was in today’s business environment, and difficult to work with in terms of finding qualified talent and applying patches. Reconfiguring the company’s SMPP apps on AWS was a big step forward during the project, and it also led to Monty Mobile discovering issues with its own code at the packet level, which the company then fixed.

“We always have new products and challenges. But now we approach them in the best possible way, with our technology aligned to best practice.”
- Ibrahim Jaber, Chief Information Security Manager, Monty Mobile

Bring Your Own IP Addresses

Another challenge was overcome with the introduction of AWS Bring your own IP addresses (BYOIP) in early 2019. Monty Mobile is bound to its customers around the globe through its proprietory IP addresses, and changing them was not something the company was prepared to consider. The introduction of AWS BYOIP accelerated the process in advance of the full migration. Other benefits to the business include improved security, increased speed of connectivity, and extended availability of Monty Mobile services. “We always have new products and new challenges at Monty Mobile,” says Jaber. “But now we approach them in the best possible way, with our technology aligned to best practice. I can say that, today, Monty Mobile now has a cloud-first strategy.”