BAT Presentation on building a private mobile sync cloud at the GigaSpaces CloudCrowd Evening Gathering in London - November 2009

1. Mobile Sync Cloud Alejandro M. Ramallo - Group Head of Technology, BAT Phil Shotton - Cloudscape

2. 2 Background The MARTINI Project is a global initiative to provide a flexible, extensible TM&D system A System-of-systems (SOA) aimed at replacing the existing regional/local solutions. More than 10,000 Sales Reps worldwide will use hand-held devices (Smart-phones, PDAs etc) to manage sales fulfilment and order delivery functions The hand-held will run a bespoke application accessing a local database holding an extract from the BAT backend’s master database

3. 3 Objectives Robust, resilient synchronisation capability Full database load Bi-directional delta synchronisation Background scheduling of data retrieval and synchronisation Field-level delta updates to minimise network bandwidth requirements and backend system load

4. 4 Requirements Provide bi-directional, asynchronous, delta synchronisation Conflict resolution at field level Minimise mobile connect time Plug-in architecture, extensible Scalability Performance Hub-and-spoke capabilities

5. 5 Scale 2,500,000 outlets visited every week more than once ~ 4 million visits 10,000 Sales Reps * 77 Mb per user = 752 Gb

7. State in RDBMS or Queues

8. No hub-and-spoke

9. High availability is costly

10. RDBMS requires administration

11. Development platform lock-in

12. Not really made for our data volumes

13. Stateless engine

14. Bespoke caching

15. State in RDBMS

16. Hub-and-spoke more difficult to implement

17. High availability is costly

18. RDBMS requires administration

19. Development platform lock-in

20. Not really made for our data volumes

21. 100% in-memory

22. Distributed

23. Partitioning

24. Hub-and-spoke

25. Cleaner/Better programming model

26. Multi-platform support

27. Resilience

29. 8 Challenges Data Mapping Data extraction, visibility, 'invisible' delete Support multiple models simultaneously Decouple sync clients Memory and Performance requirements

30. 9 Scale 2,500,000 outlets visited every week more than once ~ 4 million visits 10,000 Sales Reps * 77 Mb per user = 752 Gb 53 Sales Reps per space @ 4 Gb per space 188 spaces + backup @10 spaces per machine = 38 machines

31. 10 Design Principles Decompose problem into discrete tasks Tasks model process flow Pluggable services provide business logic Extraction, Upload and Mapping driven by externally-managed configuration Highly-scalable, resilient, space-based architecture

32. 11 High Level Architecture Mobile Software Data Centre ERP Services Space Bus (Spoke) Service Bus Sync Engine Messaging Bus CRM WAN Sync Gateway Space Bus (Hub) Mobile Software Sync Engine

33. 12 High Level Architecture

34. 13 Internal Architecture

35. 14 Downward flow

36. 15 Upward flow

37. 16 Backend extract

38. 17 Reconciliation

39. 18 Backend upload

40. 19 Lessons learned GigaSpaces can be used to create a Mobile Data Cloud Volumes of scale with resiliency can be achieved You are only as fast as your slowest link / bottleneck Monolithic Back Office systems present challenges that can be overcome although it would be nice if vendors migrate to SOA (really)

41. 20 Questions