Turning Vision Into Reality
With Linux on IBM OpenPower and BladeCenter JS20 servers, China's YeePay can start small and grow
By: Jim Utsler
Without visionaries spotting emerging business trends and markets, the global economy might not be what it is--or exist at all, for that matter. These imaginative individuals recognized, for example, that the Internet could create boundary-free ways of conducting business, allowing consumers to shop from their homes and businesses worldwide to reach them.
Of course, these same prophetic business leaders would be hampered if not for technology. It is, after all, IT that makes all of the above possible, with the Web allowing for customer purchase and payment (both private and commercial) and behind-the-scenes high-tech distribution systems providing same-day order processing. Without computers and associated technologies, even simple tasks such as balancing the books would still be a pencil-and-paper job.
One company that might indeed be hailed as visionary, if for nothing other than spotting and addressing a weakness in an emerging economy, is YeePay, the Beijing, China-based provider of secure payment services for phone (both mobile and landline) and online users. Not only has it begun filling a gap in the Chinese economy, but also deployed a simple yet powerful IT infrastructure to make it all happen. Thanks to the use of an OpenPower* 720 server and two IBM* BladeCenter* JS20 servers, it's turning vision into reality.
Four Reasons
Based in Beijing and with offices in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Inner Mongolia, and Silicon Valley, Calif., YeePay (pronounced "e-pay") is being positioned as "the PayPal of China," according to Chen Yu, YeePay's vice president of marketing. But rather than focusing on credit cards, YeePay works with customers who use debit cards. This is in large part because the credit-card business in China isn't nearly as large as in other countries, especially those in the west. "Credit-card penetration in China is very low," Yu notes, adding that "The total number of credit cards is, I believe, around 30
Million--and this is of a population of around 1.3 billion."
Cash and bank (or debit) card transactions, however, are much more prolific. Of course, cash can't be used for any online transactions (until, that is, someone comes up with a teleportation device), so that leaves bank cards to fill the void. But because bank cards require a PIN, there has to be a way to authenticate and process payments without users having to worry about PIN security issues. Hence YeePay, which works with both consumers and merchants to process transactions, whether over the Internet, via mobile phones or traditional landline phones. "China has become the largest mobile market in the world," Yu points out. "And it's the second-largest Internet economy in the world, with more than 100 million users. It also has nearly 400 million installed telephone units. There's an absolute need for our services so people can securely and confidently make online transactions."
Since opening its doors for business in 2005, the company has already signed up more than 1000 merchants to take advantage of YeePay services. Most of these are in the online gaming and online travel-agency industries, the latter of which Yu characterizes as the Chinese "equivalents of Travelocity and Expedia." YeePay's focus on these sectors is a prelude to a larger rollout, which is similar to the method by which credit cards became so ubiquitous in the United States. "Credit-card issuers started with restaurants and then hotels," he says. "So right now, we're working a lot with online-gaming companies and travel agencies, although we plan to branch out from there."
Because the company plans to greatly expand its offerings over the next several years, it needed an IT infrastructure that could easily grow with it. This now includes the JS20 blades and the OpenPower 720, SUSE Linux*, IBM DB2* Universal Database*, IBM WebSphere* Application Server and payment-transaction applications YeePay built with Java* 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE). Regarding Linux, Yu says, "We wanted to run a platform that's based on industry open standards. This gives us the flexibility to easily integrate other solutions and components as we need them."
Initially, before beginning actual operations, YeePay had deployed a Sun Microsystems-based solution that included offerings from BEA Systems and Oracle. Although the company could have begun business operating within the confines of this environment, it chose to look at alternatives before going live. This, according to Yu, was because or four primary reasons, the first of which had to do with creating an IT infrastructure that came from a single vendor.
As Yu explains, "We didn't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. As it was, we had to deal with Sun for the hardware, Oracle for the database and then BEA for the Web application server. Now, with IBM, we have a total solution: the hardware, the database, the application server and even the technical consulting. It's all integrated, coming from one vendor, and if something does go wrong, there's no finger pointing; you know exactly where to go for support."
The second reason had to do with "quality of services," as Yu puts it, including availability, security and scalability. The latter was particularly important because the company expects to grow well past its current 1000-plus merchant customer base in short order. Now, using blades, the company can scale according to need, employing only the required capacity instead of too much, by, for example, purchasing a separate box that cost too much and vastly exceeds current processing requirements.
"We wanted something that could grow with us, because we expect to see rapid growth of transaction volume," Yu says. "So from IBM, we got business on-demand capabilities, and we have an infrastructure and platform that really scale." He also notes that availability is crucial given YeePay's business, which, he says, "requires 24-7 availability." And thus far, the company has had no unplanned downtime.
YeePay's third reason for moving to the IBM solution had to do with what
Yu calls "good domain knowledge." By this he means that IBM is already well entrenched in the Chinese banking industry, which makes it a good fit for the type of business YeePay is conducting.
As Yu elaborates, "Most of the major banks in China are IBM customers, and we think that1s a very important relationship we can leverage."
The fourth but no less important reason simply has to do with customer relations. IBM has become a known brand in China, and according to Yu, "even average consumers recognize it, not just those involved in the IT industry. So our customers will see the IBM logo on our Web site and, by proxy, give us more credibility. That boosts our marketability." And given that YeePay is one of the first companies to enter this industry in the Chinese market, this is a key advantage.
Although YeePay itself doesn1t have a datacenter (its IT assets are hosted by a third party), it does maintain and administer the systems. This allows YeePay to avoid the hassles of controlling the physical environment while still having control over the day-to-day operations of the systems. "We deploy the applications and we administer the servers ourselves. The datacenter host manages the network connections, the temperatures and other types of basic datacenter operations," Yu says. This, he continues, "is a testament to the ease of use of the blades and the OpenPower system."
Start Small and Grow
Without the forward-looking philosophy of companies such as YeePay, we might indeed still run in a cash-only economy, with trusted online payments not even being a notion. Instead, we now have the ability to make bill payments online, secure in the knowledge that our transactions will be well tendered. But behind every great idea is often great technology, as the story of YeePay indicates.
By moving to an open standard such as Linux, YeePay can now continue to innovate, knowing that as its business grows, so too can its IT environment. By simply plugging and playing, it has become part of the on-demand business world, avoiding the high overhead often associated with other solutions.
"As a start-up company, we wanted to make sure we could start small and then scale as the business grows," Yu says. "Our IT environment allows us to do that."
Linux Executive Report, August 2006 Issue
