What Sets Momentum Apart

WHAT SETS

MOMENTUMAPART

A Unique Composition of Messaging Technologies and Capabilities

By Rob Marchi, Solutions Consultant and John Pinson, Senior Manager, Content Marketing and

Jose Santa Ana, Director, Product Marketing

What Sets Momentum Apart | 2

IntroductionAt its inception in the early 2000s, the Momentum digi-tal messaging solution was envisioned and took shape as a superior alternative to the open source mes-sage transfer agent (MTA) server products — Postfix, Exim, Sendmail — that were, at the time, the primary options for large-scale email sending and receiving operations. Once Momentum hit the market, it quickly became known among engineers and technicians in the Internet infrastructure and email industries as the fastest, most scalable messaging platform available. Installed in the data center, a single-box (one hardware server) Momentum implementation could handle the same sending volumes and provide superior speed of delivery compared with a 10-server implementation running open source MTA software.

But Momentum wasn’t just a better, faster race car. It represented a completely novel approach to how email could be managed, sent and received online. Momentum’s developers rethought all aspects of MTA architecture and the mail management process to come up with a complete platform that streamlines sending/receiving at every touch point to increase efficiency, performance and speed, while also increas-ing choice and flexibility around integration with applications and data sources. Among Momentum’s many innovations were a more intelligent approach to message queue management, smarter bounce handling and feedback loop processing, an integrated policy engine with a development environment that includes hundreds of APIs, and an automated deliver-ability optimization capability that draws on all of these features to help senders achieve and maintain the best possible inbox delivery rates.

These attributes set Momentum apart from the com-petition when it first debuted, and still do today. In fact, through continual refinement by the Message Systems engineering and product development teams, Momentum today provides greater performance and usability than ever. With the debut of Momentum 4 in 2014, the new Supercharger capability enables the platform to run on today’s multi-core servers. Powerful new analytics and message generation capabilities were incorporated into the platform also.

With the performance and rich feature set provided by Momentum, it’s not surprising that it has been

adopted by the organizations running the world’s most demanding and complex messaging operations. Top cloud and social media companies such as Facebook, PayPal, LinkedIn, Rackspace, Salesforce and Twitter all run Momentum, as do many of the world’s largest email service providers (ESPs) like Yesmail, Epsilon, Puresend, Acxiom, VerticalResponse and many more. Momentum is the messaging platform that enables these market leaders to set their business apart from the competition.

Not Just for Giant SendersThe Momentum story, however, isn’t just about extreme performance and cutting-edge Internet com-panies. The big social networks and ESPs had good reasons to adopt Momentum so quickly. These organi-zations can’t settle for second-rate technology — their viability depends on having the best systems in place to enable them to grow fast and support millions or billions of users. The advantages Momentum provides are obvious and easily understood in that context. But Momentum has proven to be every bit as effective and crucial to the growth of many smaller companies, and within lower-profile industries such as publishing, bank-ing, travel and telecommunications.

MAIL SERVERS: FACTS AND FIGURES

The majority of email servers found globally are open source.

71%29%

Source: http://www.mailradar.com/

In contrast, the majority of legitimate, non-spam email flows through commercial messaging platforms.


For these kinds of organizations, the benefits of investing in high-performance messaging infrastruc-ture are, quite often, not readily apparent. Getting by with a “good enough” platform is seen as the more cost-effective way to go, yet it is not. While mobile messaging streams like text and push notifications are growing fast, email is still the primary channel for cus-tomer communication. That is, it’s the medium through which businesses interact with the people who drive revenue. Relying on outdated messaging infrastructure to communicate with customers is a really bad idea, yet many companies do just that.

More than 70% of email servers on the Internet today are open source. This means that, in 2014, there are millions of organizations trying to do business using technology designed in the 1980s or 1990s. Forward-thinking business have recognized the importance of high-performance messaging architecture, and many of the world’s highest-volume senders of email have adopted commercial platforms, such as Momentum from Message Systems. This trend has led to something of an odd dichotomy where commer-cial platforms, which account for just 29% of servers connected to the Internet, now handle a majority of the world’s email traffic, and legacy open source servers, representing 71% of email servers online, handle less than half. Momentum alone handles a large chunk. A Cisco SenderBase measure of the top senders online by domain in early 2013 showed that 13 of the top 100 sending organizations run Message Systems Momentum, and that more than 25 percent of legitimate (non-spam) business-to-business and business-to-consumer email traffic today gets deliv-ered through the Momentum platform (approximately 7 billion messages/day). The capabilities of Momentum are so out of proportion to open source MTA tech-nology, that even though the number of Momentum servers deployed online is far lower than the number of open source servers, Momentum accounts for nearly a quarter of all email traffic transiting the Internet.

Meanwhile, smartphones, tablets, wireless connectivity and mobile apps have completely redefined the online experience for individuals and businesses alike. Now that customers can be reached anytime on their smart-phone through email, text or push, immediacy and flexibility have become essential to B2C interactions. Yet even as the online experience has become more

real-time, multi-channel, small screen and mobile, email remains foundational. So if you’re a company that does business online, it’s more important than ever that you get email right. The Momentum platform is the one solution on the market today that ensures organizations can do just that. How so? Momentum is the undisputed industry leader for high-volume email delivery. But also, as mentioned above, Momentum offers highly innovative queuing, bounce handling and deliverability features, along with multi-channel capabilities (text and push) and a rich development environment.

This is where Momentum’s advantages over open source MTA technology really come into play, and where companies who think they can get by with cheaper alternatives are actually missing a big opportunity to get an edge on their competition and advance their own growth. In this paper we’ll detail the technological superiority offered by Momentum, and the exact points of differentiation between Momentum and open source MTAs.

Queue ManagementIP reputation is critical to message deliverability, and segmenting traffic to separate IPs allows send-ers to protect different types of messages from one another. For instance, it’s smart to use one IP address for transactional messages (password resets, payment receipts, etc.) and another for marketing messages, which are more likely to get labeled spam and thereby degrade the reputation of that IP address. Momentum easily solves the segmentation challenge by giving senders the ability to write business logic to select and manage multiple delivery IPs, providing ease of integration and granular control over how messages are queued for delivery.

Open source solutions use a single monolithic queue to manage traffic, a very rudimentary approach. This type of architecture forces traffic into a limited number of shared queues, creating major stability problems when any one of the traffic streams encounters prob-lems. When receiving domains deem certain content or sending practices suspect, they “tarpit” traffic from the offending sender. Tarpitting slows the acceptance of a message to a crawl by drawing out server responses to the maximum time allowed (as specified in the


TRADITIONAL MTA DESIGN

Open source MTA server products force traffic into a single or limited number of shared queues. In this example, the MTA is deployed by an email services provider managing four IP address queues, two for Customer A, two for Customer B.

Content Generator

Customer A Triggered

Customer B Triggered

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TRAFFIC SEGMENTS

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DESTINATION DOMAINS

DESTINATION DOMAINS

SHARED QUEUES

INDEPENDENT QUEUES

ISPs on the receiving side of mail streams can and will block or slow traffic (tarpitting) for a variety of reasons. For senders using open source MTA products, blocks imposed by just one ISP can negatively affect all traffic on a server.

Customer A uses a rented email list that contains bad addresses, prompting Yahoo to tarpit its sending stream.

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Customer B Bulk

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Because open source MTA technology relies on rudimen-tary queuing architecture, a single tarpitting incident on one sending stream can quickly esca-late and lead to the blocking of all outgoing traffic on a server.

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SENDING ISSUES IMPACT


Simple Mail Transfer Protocol). This preserves receiver resources while consuming the sender’s. Worse still for the sender, tarpitting causes messages queued behind the offending message to back up, delaying every-thing else in the shared queue. Clearing or sidelining the affected traffic can alleviate the problem. But with queuing architecture of this kind, even just determin-ing which messages in a shared queue are causing problems can be very time consuming.

Shared queues impact basic sending requirements as well. Many senders, like large multi-division enterprises and marketing automation providers with hundreds of clients, must manage timely delivery requirements for different organizations. When using a shared queue and one sender’s large mailing is submitted, these messages are placed in front of the queues. When a subsequent mailing or transactional message is submit-ted, those messages are then placed in the queue behind the first mailing. Typically, this queue conten-tion will cause the sender of the second mailing to experience delays, which will often prompt complaints

and calls to the IT support operations.

When contention, blocks and tarpitting incidents occur on infrastructure with rudimentary queuing architecture, operators have limited options to try and solve the problem. If additional servers are available, operators can assign senders to different MTAs to avoid system contention. Additionally, operators can manually schedule mailings around other mailings on the same sever to avoid interference. For operators managing multiple IPs, however, this kind of work-around can be particularly troublesome due to the sheer number of senders and traffic streams contend-ing for optimal delivery periods. There are, after all, only so many hours in a day. These kinds of issues get exacerbated as traffic volume grows; the operator must

invest in more resources just to manage the problems. Left unaddressed, tarpitting and block issues will degrade the reputation of the associated IP addresses, and senders can find themselves in the unfortunate position of getting placed on ISP blacklists. Juggling senders and adding hardware can address the prob-lem, but these measures are manually intensive, costly and introduce operational risk. Without an effective solution, many companies find the profitability of their email operations eroding as costs outpace the growth of their revenue streams.

Unfortunately, many senders have no idea that the poor queuing capabilities of their email infrastructure are the root cause of their sending problems. Many senders have dealt with these issues for so long that they accept it is just part of the business of sending email. Top senders, however, know that it does not have to be this way; and that high perfor-mance sending platforms, like Momentum, employ intelligent queuing that solves or avoids tarpitting and backups altogether.

QUEUING AND IP MANAGEMENT: MUCH EASIER WITH MOMENTUM

Momentum allows the operator to designate outbound IP addresses for specific traffic streams, so transactional email such as welcome messages or password resets can be sent from one virtual IP address while market-ing traffic can be sent from another. A key differentiator between Momentum and open source solutions is this: as traffic is processed, Momentum creates a set of receiving domain queues for each traffic stream. Each queue is then independently processed in parallel with the others. For example, a mailing with 50,000 messages that is throttled by the Yahoo queue for one traffic stream will never cause delays to Yahoo queues of other traffic streams. Transactional or bulk traffic will have no impact on any of the other traffic streams, and any queuing problem is limited to a tiny, easily detected fraction of the overall traffic.

For retailers, publishers and e-businesses, timely mes-sage delivery is key to driving revenue. For ESPs and marketing automation companies, timely delivery is not just key to driving revenue but is vital to the com-pany’s very existence. When problems arise, seconds count. It is imperative that system monitoring allows

What starts as a small problem with one sending stream quickly turns into a big problem negatively affecting all sending streams.


Each customer assigned segment with dedicated IP. Traffic is managed inde-pendently, per segment, per destination domain.

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With Momentum, if Customer A encounters a block on Yahoo, only that single stream is affected. Customer A’s traffic to other domains continues to flow, and Customer B’s sending streams are completely unaffected.

MOMENTUM DELIVERY ARCHITECTURE

Momentum creates a set of receiving domain queues for each virtual IP. When a tarpitting or ISP block occurs, the problem is isolated and the other customer IP streams on the server remain unaffected.

Content Generator

Content Generator

TRAFFIC SEGMENTS

TRAFFIC SEGMENTS

DESTINATION DOMAINS

DESTINATION DOMAINS

INDEPENDENT QUEUES

INDEPENDENT QUEUES


the operator to quickly determine the source of an issue. If the system reports on an aggregate basis or does not provide insight into the behavior of each indi-vidual traffic stream, the operator is forced to analyze log files: a very labor-intensive and tedious process. As traffic streams and volumes increase, the number of problems encountered will also increase. Furthermore, increased message volumes directly correlate to the amount of data that requires analysis. In turn, this requires increased efforts to resolve the problems encountered. Over time this vicious circle becomes a zero-sum game.

KEY DISTINCTION:

Because Momentum enables management down to the receiving domain of each sending IP address, it can easily provide diagnostic statistics at the same level of granularity. Momentum’s reporting console sorts data by number and percentage of activity, giving the operator a clear view into traffic operations. The opera-tor can see which traffic streams have unusually high bounce rates and what types of bounces are occurring most frequently, thereby providing the operator and the deliverability manager the information required to immediately begin remediating the issue.

Bounce and FBL Processing and RemediationBounce codes and feedback loop (FBL) reports present a daunting challenge to senders. Bounce codes are machine-generated by the receiving email server at an ISP when a message can’t be delivered due to mistaken address or other error. Each receiving domain implements differing policies for bouncing messages. For example, some receiving domains bounce messages with invalid recipients during the SMTP transaction (in band) while others send a bounce after the transaction is complete (out of band or asynchronous). The bounce code and reason for the bounce can differ between ISP receivers as well. Each receiver has many reasons for bouncing or deferring a message. Moreover, as a sender’s subscriber base grows, the number of bounce types grows exponen-tially. As bounces return to the system, the operator must remediate the bounce with their systems. For example, it is critical for the sender to immediately

stop sending to any addresses reported as invalid by the receiving domain.

Processing feedback loops (FBLs) is another time-con-suming task. FBLs are records of recipient responses to email — when you mark a message as spam, for instance — and most domains send a standard Abuse Reporting Format (ARF) report to the originator. The report formatting and content varies by reporting domain, making FBL processing a complicated pro-gramming effort. Low cost MTAs have little or no FBL functionality, at best providing a mechanism for routing FBL reports to a folder or dedicated mailbox. If the operator wants to automate the process for interpret-ing the FBL information and implementing remediation policies, that would require designing, building and maintaining an application to do so. The case is similar with bounce processing. Open source MTAs were originally designed for small enterprise applications. When sending in large volumes, the corresponding volume of bounce messages quickly becomes too large for human interpretation. Again, volume senders must build a custom bounce-processing application to interpret and remediate all the bounced messages.

In a small company with relatively simple email processes, scripting code to handle straightforward bounce and FBL remediation policies might not be a heavy lift. But for mid-size companies, and any organization managing multiple servers and domains with distinct policies for different customers or divi-sions — like an email services provider, for instance — managing FBLs and bounces can become highly complex and difficult. In fact, bounce and FBL process-ing represent a very expensive hidden cost of owning a legacy or open source MTA. Managing bounce and FBL interpretation and continually updating remedia-tion policies to meet evolving ISP rules (which can and do change over time) requires significant engi-neering resources.

BOUNCE AND FBL PROCESSING: EASIER WITH MOMENTUM

Momentum includes dedicated bounce and FBL pro-cessing and remediation modules, providing a simple out-of-the-box mechanism for managing this critical part of your messaging infrastructure. Additionally, Message Systems maintains the Live Bounce Updates


service, which provides a professionally managed bounce code interpreter that eliminates the need to constantly analyze new bounce codes. Message Systems monitors unclassified bounce codes from the worldwide ISP community through the Adaptive Email Network, and regularly uploads new interpretations to our customers’ systems. The module automatically sorts bounces to approximately 20 classifications. Because the classification is available to the policy engine, a simple script can be written to manage remediation policies. The entire process is completely automated, or Momentum operators can choose to customize rules for their own environment.

Momentum’s bounce and FBL modules provide many useful features. For instance, the operator can add invalid recipients to a global suppression list to ensure the system never sends to a bad address again. Momentum can also update other systems with information on address status, so the opera-tor can prompt users to update their address. More

complicated policies such as counting the number of ‘mailbox full’ or ‘vacation replies’ before remediat-ing are also easily managed in the policy engine. The operator can make changes to the policies with minor script or configuration changes, eliminating the need for expensive engineering effort, regression testing and long release cycles. Additionally, Momentum has an Adaptive Delivery module, which uses rules and the data streamed through the FBL and bounce modules to optimize outgoing traffic, throttling it down or accel-erating it based on ISP feedback (see next section on Adaptive Delivery).

Momentum’s ability to support inbound, reply and out-of-band bounces through the same platform from which messages are sent provides significant value for simplifying sender architecture and feeding data back to the application layer and associated databases. Real-time insight into sending and queue manage-ment within Momentum is highly valuable to ESP senders. With commodity infrastructure, users find that

Momentum tracks and reports on bounces (permanent failures) and transient failures, helping postmasters to resolve problems and optimize delivery.


FORRESTER RESEARCH TOTAL ECONOMIC IMPACT STUDY

As we pointed out in the introduction, the benefits to small and mid-size companies of upgrading from an open source MTA to a Message Systems solution aren’t always readily apparent. We put this white paper together to highlight the technical advantages Momentum holds over open source products. But we’d be remiss to not include independent research. Below we outline some highlights from The Total Economic Impact of the Message Systems Momentum Platform, an independent report prepared by Forrester Research in 2013.

To prepare this report, Forrester analysts interviewed five mid-size firms that use Momentum. These companies averaged around $200 million in annual revenue, with

sending volumes of around 2 million to 2.7 million messages per day. The key findings were that, over a 3-year period, Momentum would provide positive economic benefits through revenue augmentation and cost reduction. The table below shows that Return on Investment (ROI), with all costs loaded in over the 3 years, is 115%. This is an excellent payback, as most studies of this nature find IT solutions delivering ROI in the 65-70% range. Forrester concludes that a company of similar size to those interviewed could expect a risk-adjusted return of $1,069,399 in cost savings and increased revenue after three full years using Momentum rather than a commodity MTA.

RISK- ADJUSTED ROI PAYBACK PERIOD TOTAL BENEFITS (PV) TOTAL COSTS (PV) NET PRESENT VALUE

115% 10 months $1,069,399 $497,504 $571,895

QUANTIFIED BENEFIT (RISK ADJUSTED BY 10%) THREE-YEAR TOTAL PRESENT VALUE

Hardware avoidance savings — fewer servers needed for Momentum versus legacy on-premises MTA $70,200 $58,192

IT labor savings — managing the Momentum platform versus the on-premises legacy solution (2.5 FTEs versus 0.6 FTEs for Momentum) $742,500 $615,496

Incremental gross margin profit from increased revenues (Momentum responsible for $630,000 incremental revenue at 85% gross margin) $481,950 $395,711

Total three-year benefits $1,294,650 $1,069,399

The Organization: Three-Year Risk-Adjusted ROI. Payback Period, Costs and Benefits

The Organization: Risk-adjusted benefits of Momentum

The Total Economic Impact of the Message Systems Momentum Platform. Forrester Research 2013.


they know when messages leave their own campaign management or CMS application, but have no idea how long it takes their MTA to send the messages after that. In some cases, it could take several hours — and this is deeply frustrating for their clients. All of these issues are easily addressed by the Message Systems solution.

KEY DISTINCTION:

Companies on the Momentum platform typically use significantly less engineering resources to operate and maintain their messaging infrastructure. Instead of building and maintaining their own bounce and FBL remediation modules, companies can redirect resources to building applications or services that provide competitive advantage to their core busi-ness. Because all of the bounce and FBL processing is managed in real-time within the Momentum platform, ancillary hardware and software is eliminated from the infrastructure. By taking advantage of the plat-form capabilities of Momentum, the operator is able to achieve significant savings in labor and hardware resources. In fact, a recent study by Forrester Research found that a mid-size company with daily traffic of approximately 2 million messages per day would, by upgrading to the Momentum platform from open source, gain a return on investment of more than one million dollars over a three-year period (see sidebar table, page 9).

Adaptive DeliveryAs any email industry veteran can tell you, email deliv-erability — the catchall term referring to the methods and technologies employed to ensure high inbox delivery rates — is equal parts art and science. Traffic shaping has been a key deliverability tactic for a long time, but the reactive, iterative approach to email traf-fic shaping is inherently flawed. It requires significant time, money and effort to keep up with acceptance policies, monitor ISP bounce codes, research prob-lems and fine-tune settings — only to discover your adjustments don’t really solve anything. Even while it saps valuable resources, traffic shaping still can’t align sending rules with ISP requirements on a per-message/per-sender basis. You can work with the best delivery specialists available, but passive traffic shaping is guar-anteed to keep you in perpetual recovery mode. Yet

this is exactly how senders using open source messag-ing infrastructure are forced to operate.

Some commercial systems do have the ability to automatically throttle back sending when significant numbers of bounces are encountered. But slowing problematic streams is only one link in the very long chain of processes and events that affect IP reputation and overall deliverability. Open source severs, lacking an integrated policy engine, must handle bounce and FBL processing by routing messages to another appli-cation server. Operators must develop and maintain the processing systems, requiring several developers dedicated to external applications. All of these pro-cesses are automated with Momentum and Adaptive Delivery.

DELIVERABILITY OPTIMIZATION: AUTOMATED WITH MOMENTUM

Adaptive Delivery is an industry first — it auto-tunes your outbound email delivery parameters and traf-fic shaping in real-time — to avoid blocks, safeguard your reputation and optimize delivery. Email programs executed with Adaptive Delivery and the Momentum platform produce consistently higher success rates. Campaigns perform better, problems are avoided or quickly resolved, and sender reputation with ISPs soars. Momentum with Adaptive Delivery is far more sophisticated than open source MTA products because it is proactive, automatically suspending or ramping up your mailings based on real-time feedback.

AEN: INTELLIGENCE FOR SENDERS

The Adaptive Email Network (AEN) compiles email data from global ISPs and the world’s largest senders and processors of email — constituting over 90% of global email traffic — and makes that intelligence available to Message Systems customers through daily online updates. Through the AEN, Message Systems is uniquely able to analyze message disposition data and create intelligent send-ing rules. Senders using Message Systems solutions have far higher rates of compliance with ISP use policies, and therefore experience fewer bounces, blocks and delays in their email streams.


As pointed out above, the Momentum platform has advanced traffic processing capabilities with integrated modules for both bounce classification and feedback loop processing. Adaptive Delivery uses the real-time information streamed through these modules to update and optimize traffic shaping parameters, such as the number of open connections on a domain, volume of messages per hour, retry times, etc. Paired with Momentum’s intelligent queue management architecture, Adaptive Delivery enables you to not only establish a stellar sender reputation, but also improve it over time to reach consistently excellent inbox per-formance. Adaptive Delivery consists of four elements:

IP Warm-Up

Mailing with an IP address that has no sending reputation is almost as risky as using one with a bad reputation. ISPs often delay or block mailings originat-ing from new IPs, yet most messaging solutions lack the tools to overcome this common obstacle. A native feature of Adaptive Delivery, IP Warm-Up automati-cally builds a good sending reputation for all new IP addresses. By enabling you to establish a good send-ing reputation for IP addresses before use, IP Warm-Up helps you to gain a deliverability advantage right out of the gate, and minimize costs and reputation risk from delayed or undelivered mail.

Rule Sets

Adaptive Delivery provides four rule sets for traffic shaping and automated queue management:

A. Static Traffic Shaping Rules: Introduced for fixed, known traffic shaping scenarios.

B. Warm-Up Rules: Used for settings that increase as reputation is built during the IP warm-up pro-cess. These settings increase as the IP ages until a pre-defined limit is reached.

C. Dynamic Rules: The key to throttling traffic dynamically and preventing reputation issues.

D. ISP Block Handling Rules: Used to a) identify ISP responses that require a suspension of sending and b) suspend traffic to the target ISP from the affected IP address for the period of time needed to investigate and resolve the block without bom-barding ISPs when they rejecting your mail.

Traffic Shaping

Momentum automatically optimizes your mail queues to comply with ISP acceptance policies. It also sets parameters such as maximum number of outbound connections, limiting the rate at which connections are established or the rate at which messages are delivered. Momentum operators can adjust sending and retry rates, or suspend deployment in the case of rolling blocks based on disposition results for each email stream, automatically and in real time. You can also resolve issues before they become problems that threaten your deliverability and reputation, and gain a real boost in efficiency.

Smart Threshold Management

Adaptive Delivery automatically takes action when thresholds for bounces and/or feedback loop reports (FBL) are exceeded. These thresholds, which are modi-fiable and can be set on a per-binding or per-domain basis using Sweep Rules, prompt several remedial actions depending on bounce or FBLs over a defined range. For example, if a mailing incurs a hard bounce rate threshold of 3%, Adaptive Delivery will throttle down that mailing. If a mailing reaches a 10% bounce rate, the system will suspend it completely for four hours. In the same way, the system can throttle down and suspend a mailing depending on threshold settings for FBLs.

KEY DISTINCTION:

Adaptive Delivery’s many unique capabilities help Message Systems customers consistently reach the best possible inbox performance while maintaining excellent sender reputations with the ISP community.

LIVE UPDATES

Message Systems updates ISP block handling rules and other rule sets on a six-hour cycle so that you always have the latest intelligence to ensure optimal delivery. Updates are con-tinually refreshed with data from the Adaptive Email Network, then automatically downloaded and maintained in a local database to persist over restarts. The Message Systems deliver-ability team has brought virtually all the world’s major ISPs (and many minor ones as well) into the AEN and continually optimizes Momentum implementations through Live Rule Updates.


With Adaptive Delivery, Momentum automates the tasks of managing delivery and proactively notifies the operator of issues before they become problems. This allows email marketers and deliverability experts to refocus on what they do best — creating and manag-ing effective email programs.

Momentum Development EnvironmentThe Momentum development environment gives the operator the ability to implement custom business logic into the message delivery process. Why is this important? First, let’s review some background on Momentum and email management in general. In any mid-size to large company, composing, managing and sending email is likely to involve many different IT resources. Momentum serves as the core sending (and receiving) platform, but there are also content author-ing and management systems, list management tools, anti-virus and anti-spam applications, deliverability monitoring and many other kinds of systems that can come into play — including SMS and push notification resources for mobile messaging. With open source MTA, integrating these pieces into a functional whole requires significant amounts of custom development work, usually in the form of C code script develop-ment. In other words, you’re on your own. With Momentum, integration with secondary messaging resources is made far easier through the Momentum policy engine and its flexible, API-driven architecture and its rich collection of webhooks.

An API is essentially a “hook” or connection point that exposes some function of the Momentum plat-form to outside applications. For instance, you could use a commercial content management system to originate source email text and address lists for an email campaign, use one of our APIs to access and integrate graphical content from a separate database, and then use a second group of APIs to inject or send that email campaign on to your recipients through the Momentum platform. Because our library of APIs is so extensive, it is even possible to write a unique interface to manage all of your end-to-end messaging needs — from creation to delivery reporting. Our own web management interface is built largely on top of these APIs, and many Message Systems clients use our APIs to monitor messaging activity, perform list hygiene,

generate custom bounce messages and handle many other tasks. In an open source environment, all of this integration work would need to be done from the ground up.

The policy engine offers powerful server extensibil-ity, enabling operators to use the Lua programming language to script any number of email processes and manage APIs to, for instance, automate authen-tication, invoke AV/AS screening, look up recipient addresses in a database or trigger sends. The policy engine also allows the operator to implement logic in each phase of the message transaction, and includes plug-ins to external data sources, allowing the opera-tor to read or write data in any database. Finally, the operator can build custom applications or inte-grate third-party applications using the C software development tool kit, which provides even deeper integration to the Momentum platform. With the API set, developers effectively have source-code-level capabilities without the burden of maintaining the core code. Customizations can range from simple policies for routing messages to outbound IP addresses or authenticating a connection against an LDAP directory, to more complex processes such as implementing a blind messaging proxy between subscribers on a social media site.

KEY DISTINCTION:

Momentum and its policy engine provide users with endless possibilities. For instance, when it comes to managing bounce and FBL reports, Momentum has the intelligence to easily manage the inbound stream. The policy engine updates the operator databases with invalid addresses and unsubscribes FBL reporters. For receivers, the policy engine implements acceptance and throttling policy based on DNS BLs, IP and domain reputation, sending practices, and third-party content scanners. By tracking the behavior of each sender over different time windows, Momentum can dynami-cally block senders as their behavior is deemed more abusive. With this level of extensibility and flexibility, Momentum gives operators key advantages over the competition. You can also get new features or services to market faster using the tools provided. Additionally, Momentum’s modular architecture allows Message Systems customers to quickly and easily respond to market changes and deliver new market-driven fea-tures and standards, which can be supported through


extensions rather than developing new core code. For instance, deploying DMARC authentication or updat-ing infrastructure for the emerging IPv6 standard is far easier with Momentum. By avoiding longer develop-ment and testing cycles, both Message Systems and our customers win.

SuperchargerToday’s “need it now” consumer culture demands quick and reliable email delivery. Most people expect to receive bank statements, flight confirmations, purchase details, social media notifications, and more within seconds of conducting transactions. Very few are willing to wait until tomorrow to get the information they need.

Senders expect near-instantaneous delivery of emails too. Perhaps they have a time-sensitive offer their cus-tomers must see before it expires, or maybe they are delivering financial research to investors who have to receive it simultaneously so no one has an edge over others. And if they’re one of the ever-growing number of e-commerce web sites, they want customers to get purchase recognition emails immediately, so buyers feel secure about their transactions.

Messaging workflows tend to be the most critical part of any transactional experience. Customers expect confirmation emails in their inboxes before the pur-chase confirmation page finishes loading in their web browser. Transmission latency isn’t the main obstacle to messaging delivery, however: The message-creation event is what can introduce lag into the system, and it’s

arguably the most important part of the process, since delays can create a cascading effect that could ulti-mately frustrate hundreds or thousands of recipients.

Much of the power needed to create those messages lies in a system’s CPU. Around 2006, Moore’s Law began to plateau, meaning CPU power wasn’t dou-bling roughly every two years, as originally predicted in 1965. That led chip designers to introduce multiple cores in each CPU. When servers featuring eight or more cores per CPU and ultra-high-speed solid state drives (SSDs) became readily affordable, message transfer agent (MTA) software such as Momentum needed to scale accordingly.

MOMENTUM WITH SUPERCHARGER: A NEED FOR SPEED

Momentum has been re-architected to tap into the capabilities of modern multi-core server hardware, enabling the platform to perform at much higher speeds and throughput levels, and to run multiple event loops per CPU.

Called Supercharger, this new capability sets Momentum apart from MTAs that operate on a single master event loop. Momentum now has the ability to leverage virtually all available I/O, CPU, and memory resources on modern systems that offer multiple cores and extremely fast I/Os. In fact, in every lab and production test we ran, Momentum with Supercharger was able to fully saturate (max out the performance capabilities of) at least one system resource, such as network interface, disk or CPU — including the

In today’s world of high-speed connections everywhere, senders need messaging infrastructure that can get the mail delivered soonest — ideally in less than 250 milliseconds (ms). The user experience suffers when the messaging component of an online transaction cannot be executed quickly enough.


ultra-fast PCI SSDs. With this increase in raw through-put, Momentum with Supercharger provides at least four times the performance of standard Momentum running on a conventional single-core CPU server. In systems with plenty of available CPU bandwidth and very fast disks, the increase could be dramati-cally greater than that, such as what resulted in one Message Systems customer’s production environment where we achieved in excess of 18 million messages per hour.

THE POWER OF MULTIPLE EVENT LOOPS

Momentum’s ability to initiate multiple event loops means that senders can now horizontally distribute hardware-intensive tasks, including mail queuing, message reception, message delivery, and Adaptive Delivery processes. The event loops are also configu-rable so specific tasks may be isolated if necessary, including transactional message creation or receiv-ing. Supercharger not only reduces latency but it also

makes the remaining lag more predictable, since operations can be isolated from each other.

For example, transactional injection operations can be isolated from all other operations, creating a more consistent environment that allows your customers to receive messages nearly immediately while interacting with your site. Before this feature was introduced, predicting which tasks were about to happen within the system at any given time was not possible. Now, by dedicating a pool of event loops just for trans-actional message injections, for instance, you can dramatically improve the quality of service for your customers. Additionally, because event loop pools are configurable, allowing you to define which types of events are assigned to which event loops, it becomes possible to guarantee quality of service for individual message streams.

KEY DISTINCTION:

All the advantages and benefits of Supercharger — increased raw throughput, reduced latency, and improved consistency and predictability — are designed to help senders gain greater value from their messaging operations at a lower total cost of ownership. Additionally, by reducing server require-ments, Momentum with Supercharger reduces power consumption and eliminates potential points of failure in the data center. Put simply, Supercharger provides the absolute highest performance and scalability of any digital messaging server platform on the market today. It has everything high-volume senders need to meet digital messaging needs now, and well into the future.

with superchargerProc

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By dramatically shortening the time required for the messaging component within an online transaction, Momentum ensures faster, more satisfying online user experiences.


AnalyticsBusinesses today are moving beyond traditional batch-and-blast email marketing to engage with consumers in more personalized ways across a variety of new digi-tal channels, including targeted email, SMS and MMS text, and push notifications to mobile apps. These new techniques and channels allow marketers and engage-ment professionals to target narrower consumer segments based on data points such as location, time of day, shopping history and other variables, some-times to the point of targeting a single individual.

As these new capabilities add more options to the marketer’s arsenal, so grows the need for advanced analytics and big data tools to monitor message disposition and response data in order to develop a more complete picture of the overall customer journey as they transition from message channel to website or other customer touch-point. Yet older messaging infrastructure and analytical tools can limit insight into messaging data streams.

Consider that the message queuing architecture of most MTA-type legacy email servers can’t always deliver messages reliably, meaning it’s not uncom-mon to experience blocks and delays lasting several hours or more, with attendant delays in collection of return email data. Complications can arise with mobile message disposition data also. Mobile carriers and aggregators have inconsistent standards for provid-ing delivery reports and acceptance status code data

back to senders, making it challenging for marketers to immediately gauge the outcome of a campaign when it takes time to consolidate all the results.

Brands that outsource their messaging operations to the cloud often find that while many email service providers offer strong analytics, many can’t always pro-vide real-time access to detailed data. Delays of two to three days are commonplace, which can prevent brands from quickly improving subsequent campaigns, let alone tweaking campaigns in progress. In other cases the data made available might be aggregate or summary data. Hence, the challenge many mar-keters face isn’t just collecting data and analyzing it, but rather, accessing granular, detailed data in a timely manner.

MESSAGE ANALYTICS: REAL-TIME REPORTING FOR AGILE MARKETING

Momentum captures and reports complete data on deliverability and customer engagement in real time so you can track and optimize campaigns on the fly. Easy-to-use dashboards and reports help you navigate and analyze real-time data on message processing and disposition across channels, including metrics like messages queued, delivered, opened and bounced. An intuitive web interface provides simple ad hoc and drill-down navigation so you can zero in on issues and trends, from root causes of delivery problems to emerging opportunities for higher-impact messaging.


HIGH PERFORMANCE AND BIG DATA SCALABILITY

With Momentum 4, Message Systems now utilizes a widely deployed, highly distributed document store. This open source, high performance, extremely scal-able database management system is designed to handle large amounts of operational data across many servers, providing high availability with no single point of failure. The new system was designed around peer-to-peer symmetric nodes instead of master nodes (read and write anywhere). This distributed approach makes for an extremely fault-tolerant, high-availability system, and also enables simple horizontal scaling. As data volumes grow, you can achieve linear perfor-mance increases simply by adding new nodes through an online interface — and comfortably handle even petabytes of data.

BETTER RESULTS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS AND YOUR BUSINESS

Combining holistic insight with individual mes-sage- level analysis, Momentum Analytics helps make every aspect of your digital messaging strategy more effective. At a high level, Momentum provides

precise visibility into message, campaign and chan-nel performance to help you optimize deliverability and engagement in real time. A full understanding of past trends and patterns guides your development of best practices and helps you design more effec-tive campaigns in the future. On an individual level, the solution lets you drill down to specific messages to quickly solve customer problems, such as issues with spam, lost email or text message delivery. Putting the full value of big data to work for your messag-ing operations, Momentum helps you meet the rising expectation for an outstanding customer experience, and increase engagement and conversions through continually refined messaging operations.

FEATURES INCLUDE:

• Real-time, detailed data on deliverability and customer engagement, viewable in an intuitive web interface. You can track campaigns as they are being sent and immediately deal with deliver-ability problems, as well as make corrections, even on-the-fly changes, while the campaign is in process. Those capabilities lead to improved customer engagement.


• User-friendly drill-down navigation that lets you easily root out problems and take swift action. You can filter out the relevant elements and focus solely on important issues.

• Scalability to support big data volumes, thanks to state-of-the-art architecture that crunches numbers and reports meaningful metrics in real-time. Scalability is particularly critical when you are conducting cross-channel campaigns with large message volumes.

In addition, our Message Scope tool included in Momentum’s analytics package allows you to quickly search through email log files, drill down to specific messages and quickly deal with customer service problems, such as emails caught in spam filters, lost messages, delivery issues and more. You can search for an individual message or specific topics and gain insight into its origination, delivery and disposi-tion, including whether it’s been delivered, blocked, bounced or misdirected. You can also search by type (email or text) or across a date range and easily resend any messages.

KEY DISTINCTION:

Message Systems analytical tools for multi-channel messaging give you real-time access to a wide array of data, including disposition and processing, and messages queued, delivered, opened and bounced. You can even make corrections to campaigns on-the-fly and effortlessly drill down into big data volumes to cor-rect problems and even examine individual messages. When a campaign concludes, you’ll have a wealth of key data at your fingertips, so you can improve your messaging for the next communication. You can use that information to help you decide how to segment your customer base and target your messages accord-ingly in another campaign.

GenerationIn today’s age of online communications, companies need a comprehensive strategy for engaging with their customers through digital messages — either through email, SMS or text, push notifications to a mobile app, or through instant message or chat. Businesses are investing resources into customer engagement tech-nologies and best practices to ensure that messages

sent to their target audience result in optimum cus-tomer acquisition and retention.

But sending out a timely, relevant, personalized and compelling message is not as simple as just hitting the “Send” key. You need to determine who to send the message to — which of your customers or prospects would find this message relevant and compelling? You need to determine the right content for this audience and be able to pull this content from wherever it may be stored within the organization — be it in marketing for promotional emails or operations for transactional emails. And finally, you need the ability to assemble the content in a timely manner into the right format for the right channel, so that the message goes out at the time when it can have the most impact.

This is one of the most difficult development chal-lenges for senders — message generation. How do you generate these individualized messages, some-times millions at a time, to best engage your prospects and customers at that opportune moment? Most development languages have SMTP libraries, but these are not geared for bulk message generation. And those solutions that do exist for bulk generation are often housed somewhere else, separated from the messaging layer, and are often hard to integrate against — thus causing latency and performance issues that result in messages not getting out on time. This translates into missed opportunities to best engage your customers.

MOMENTUM GENERATION: HIGH-VOLUME, INDIVIDUALIZED MESSAGE CREATION

The Generation module of Momentum Platform accepts content, lists and templates from external sources and constructs a message for each recipient. Momentum Generation addresses the growing com-plexity of messaging for businesses, enabling you to deliver messages to the right recipients, with the right content, in the right format for the right channel, at the right time. And you can do all this at high volumes — millions of messages at a time — while incorporat-ing data and assets stored in marketing or operational systems elsewhere in your organization. Most develop-ment languages have SMTP libraries, but they’re not geared for bulk message generation in a diversified enterprise environment. The bulk generation solutions that do exist are typically difficult to integrate with the


messaging layer, leading to latency and performance issues that delay delivery and undermine your engagement strategies.

Momentum Generation enables high-volume, individu-alized messaging by drawing the components of a transmission from external CRM, CMS, analytics and business intelligence systems, and then assem-bling personalized messages for each recipient. Support for both API and an SMTP transmission allows simple integration with virtually any enterprise appli-cation. Messages can be submitted individually or in batches to support both marketing campaigns, as well as transactional message programs that can be opti-mized for additional conversion goals, such as upsells and cross-sells.

SIMPLIFIED TEMPLATE MANAGEMENT

The powerful Momentum Generation templating engine lets you store and manage templates inside Momentum instead of leaving them embedded in

separate systems. These templating features allow marketing to take direct control over look and feel, and create brand-aligned messages, complete with key/value substitutions, conditional statements, loops and more, without the need for developer assistance. Templates can be stored for repeated use or submitted in-line along with the rest of the message components during the transmission for efficient one-off usage. Detailed reporting on both online and stored tem-plates helps you maximize the revenue potential of high-converting transactional messages.

INTEGRATED TEMPLATING CAPABILITIES — NO DEVELOPER ASSISTANCE NEEDED

Typically, templates are embedded in various message delivery systems, especially those for transactional messages, so developer assistance is required to modify and test them. Momentum Generation avoids that problem with a template storage and manage-ment system that allows marketing to control the

BI

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In addition to SMTP, applications can interact with Momentum using REST APIs for message injection, template management and more.

One system to do high-performance message generation for both transactional and bulk messages.

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content while operations handles calling the appropri-ate APIs. Those APIs include:

> Creating a template

> Listing templates

> Updating a template

> Previewing a template

> Promoting a draft template to be published

Momentum Generation’s powerful template engine lets you build brand-aligned messages with key/value substitutions, conditional statements, loops and more. And you can easily create, update, manage and report on in-line and stored templates. In-line templates are useful for one-off messages while stored templates can be used multiple times.

KEY DISTINCTION:

Built-in message creation with Momentum Generation improves performance and scalability to ensure on-time delivery. Tight integration with existing business intelligence, analytics, CRM and CMS systems enables you to create and deliver the right message in the right way at the right time to each customer or prospect, with direct marketing control over branding and customer experience.

MobileMomentum Mobile is the world’s first proven, enter-prise-class mobile middleware and cross-channel messaging platform. By centralizing all digital

messaging channels on a single server or cluster, Momentum Mobile gives you the ability to do what no other mobile platform can: conduct context-aware conversations with customers across email, text, chat and mobile push for apps. With Momentum Mobile you can transform message content on the fly from one channel to another and orchestrate two-way customer dialogs in real time or over a period of days. Momentum Mobile’s unique capabilities enable you to connect mobile apps to corporate systems, while shielding mobile developers from the back-end integration complexities presented by the growing diversity of mobile devices, networks and protocols.

A NEW APPROACH

Lots of companies approach mobile messaging from the mindset that it’s just a new marketing channel. “We’ve always done email marketing! Mobile’s just a new format for marketing messages.” Wrong. People today keep their phones with them all day. One report showed that 91% of adults kept their mobile phones within arm’s reach 24/7. These devices have become indispensable to all of us. Your phone is the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you put down at night. It’s your alarm clock and your personal organizer, your music player and news reader and game platform. Consider:

• 85% of Americans own mobile phones, and 91% of adults have one within arm’s reach 24/7.

• Mobile apps consume an average of 94 minutes per day, and users read 97% of the push notifications they receive.

• Fully 98% of all SMS/MMS messages are opened, with 90% of them being read within three minutes of being delivered.


AT&TAT&T 75%75%

12:1112:11Segunda-feira, 6 de fevereiroSegunda-feira, 6 de fevereiro

A “API News” gostaria de en-viá-lo notificações por pushAs notificações podem incluir sinais,

alertas e sons. Elas podem ser config-uradas em Settings (Configurações).

Text? Email? Push? Chat? How about all of the above. Mobile messaging works best when it provides value to the recipient. Push is ideal for time-sensitive messages like flight updates.


Push notifications in particular are a key way to increase customer engagement and drive sale conver-sions, since apps alert consumers to special deals and other new content whether or not they’re open on the device. Studies have shown that push notifications drive increases in daily app opens over apps lack-ing push, spur faster response times than email, and increase social sharing on Facebook and Twitter1.

Companies that want to connect with customers through the full range of mobile channels need to have intelligent capabilities to get it right. You can’t simply repurpose email marketing messages for mobile

platforms: You need to be able to apply a new set of strategies drawn from a more complex set of informa-tion. That’s where Momentum Mobile comes in.

MOMENTUM MOBILE: ENGAGING CUSTOMERS ANYWHERE, ANY TIME

Momentum Mobile lets you retrieve message content from a variety of locations and back-end business processes, allowing you to construct rich interactive messages that provide timely, engaging informa-tion to your customers. Networks supported through Momentum Mobile’s push capability include: Apple (APNs), Android (GCM) and Microsoft (MNP).

NETWORK AND DEVICE PROLIFERATION

The number of devices that can receive and send messages is exploding. New networks and apps for “over the top” messaging arise constantly. At the same time, users expect and demand a consistent experience across whatever device they’re using.

SOLVING COMPLEXITY

With some mobile platforms you need to understand screen sizes and resolutions and how to turn on the different types of message alerts, which vary by device and operating system. Momentum Mobile shields you from these back-end integration complexities, making it easy to reach customers no matter the mobile device, network or protocol.

CRM CMS

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1 Econsultancy.com, How Push Notifications Can Boost Your Mobile Strategy. August 2012.


BROADCAST OR PERSONALIZED MESSAGES

Notifications and messages can be broadcast to all, or targeted dynamically to smaller segments, or even down to individual customers — based on factors such as location, behaviors or transaction history.

CROSS-CHANNEL TWO-WAY MESSAGING

Generate your message once, and let Momentum Mobile route it to the appropriate channel: as a push notification to a mobile app, a text message, or an email.

BUSINESS POLICY AND RULES MANAGEMENT

Develop flexible and unique workflow rules based on variables including the Sending unit, target recipient’s attributes, time-of-day, channel, class of message or even the specific message.

UNIVERSAL CUSTOMER PREFERENCE SUPPORT

Incorporate customer preference data in the exe-cution of your campaigns — in accordance with your business rules.

CADENCE MANAGEMENT

Define the frequency and cadence of your communica-tions across all messaging channels.

SEAMLESS AND CONSISTENT BRAND

Consolidating message delivery on Momentum Mobile makes it easy to maintain a consistent, uniform brand look and voice across all your messaging channels.

FLEXIBLE, API-DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE

Momentum was built from the ground up with a flex-ible, API-driven architecture and is richly instrumented with webhooks that allow you to integrating your exist-ing applications, data sources, and business processes with Momentum. Those APIs feature:

• Extensibility: Momentum’s rules-based, modular framework is future-proof because you can not only tailor it to your needs today but also your needs tomorrow.

• Scalability: Momentum gives you limitless horizontal growth with efficient app integration and centralized management across geographies, so you can keep pace with your company’s success.

• Reliability: Momentum features 100% availability, automatic failover, and full carrier-class (3rd tier) sup-port to meet your mission-critical messaging needs.

• Flexible Deployment: You can use Momentum as on-premise software or as a managed, hosted service.

KEY DISTINCTION:

The mobile world opens a dizzying array of opportu-nities to connect with customers in more meaningful ways than in the past, but the diversity of options and choices for reaching mobile customers can be daunt-ing. Momentum Mobile is the single-platform solution that allows you to cut through the clutter. It gives you access to the most advanced messaging technology on the market today, with powerful, scalable perfor-mance that can manage millions of messages per hour in every messaging channel: email, text, push and even IM. Momentum Mobile ensures that your mobile costumer communication and mobile business can flourish.

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ConclusionFor senders growing their businesses, reducing costs as volumes expand allows them to invest in their core strengths and competitive differentiators, instead of on back-end infrastructure. Momentum’s granular, intelligent management of traffic streams and independent queue pro-cessing means that small problems for one stream do not impact any other streams. In other words, small problems stay small. Potential big problems — like those posed by bringing new IP addresses online — get avoided altogether. And Momentum’s management and reporting tools allow the operator to more quickly find the source of problems and solve them.

Momentum has a variety of other features not found in commodity open source messaging platforms. For example, mobile capabilities for SMS text and push notifications are a significant differentiator. So is the system’s active-active clustering, which supports distributed architecture (multiple servers in multiple data centers) and automatic failover for full business continuity (IP addresses must be moved manually or via script with commodity servers). The list goes on, but for small to mid-size companies contemplating the step up to Message Systems, the features covered in this paper are the four keys to driving far greater ROI from messaging operations: ROI that has been characterized by an authoritative third party analyst from Forrester Research as “excellent.”

Message Systems, Inc. • 301 Howard St., Suite 1330 • San Francisco, CA 94105 • tel +1 415-578-5222 • toll free usa 877-887-3031 ©2015 WP_What-Sets-Momentum-Apart_0815

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What Sets Momentum Apart