Mobility Service Providers develop content, applications and games for mobile phones. Their products are sold through mobile operators and service providers such as AT&T, T-Mobile and Vodafone, giving them access to millions of their subscribers. For these operators, Mobility Service Providers offer additional revenue opportunities to increase ARPU (Average Revenue per User) and build subscriber loyalty.

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The mobile game market segment is an example of how fast the global Mobility Services market is growing. According to Gartner, this market segment alone will double to $9.6 billion by 2011. To capitalize on this growth, Mobility Service Providers must satisfy a number of unique requirements in these emerging markets. These requirements include:

• Deliver Innovation Quickly - Mobility Service Providers and Operators need to create entertaining titles that keep game players coming back again and again. Plus, application developers need to offer feature-rich, services with business value to be adopted by thes "mobile workforce".
• Scalable Operations -Mobility Service Providers need to develop service delivery platforms that are able to manage millions of users and usage patterns in real-time across multiple telecom networks.
• Fulfill Telecom-grade SLAs - Mobility Service Provider's platforms must meet the same rigorous high availability and performance requirements as the telecom networks themselves.
• Real-time Data - Mobile games require real-time processing of subscriber data, including usage patterns, presence information, rankings and more. In addition, mobile applications, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) require real-time, secure access to customer data.

MySQL provides a number of benefits that make it an ideal fit for Mobility Service Providers building platforms that need to cost-effectively manage m-commerce, user accounts and profiles, authentication, usage patterns, presence information and more. These include:

• Easy to Use- MySQL is easy to use, maintain and develop with, so Mobility Service Providers can focus on game development and not get bogged down in ongoing database configuration and maintenance issues.
• Scalability - MySQL and MySQL Cluster are being used by some of the leading mobile operators and telecom equipment manufacturers (TEMs) like Alcatel Lucent and are proven to manage over 50 million subscribers on a single network.
• High Availability - MySQL offers a variety of high-availability options from master/slave replication configurations, to MySQL Cluster which provides real-time data processing, to open source technologies like DRBD that provide proven high-availability solutions for MySQL.
• Reliability - MySQL is recognized as a highly reliable database with millions of customers relying on MySQL to guarantee around-the-clock uptime.

MySQL provides specialized offerings that not only help Mobility Service Providers build games and applications, but also help them build powerful promotional programs, loyalty programs and gain important business intelligence from data warehousing applications. MySQL provides:

• MySQL Enterprise - MySQL Enterprise is a comprehensive offering of MySQL database software, services and support to build high-performance and scalable business-critical systems including e-Commerce, Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), and Data Warehousing applications.
• MySQL Cluster - MySQL Cluster is specifically designed to meet the real-time performance and high availability requirements of the world's largest Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEM) and Network Service Providers (NSP).