Up and coming mobile payment provider Bango has bought Dell infrastructure to power its mobile payments and analytics business.

Cambridge, UK-based Bango offers direct operator billing, whereby consumers can pay for their goods and services directly using their mobile phone rather than a credit card. The company is quoted on the AIM, and has been growing its relationships with many of the major app stores –  it has Amazon, BlackBerry World, Facebook Marketplace and Google Play among its customers – and currently logs 200,000 payment transactions a day and two billion analytics queries a month.

The company says it is growing rapidly – experiencing triple digit growth – so needed to deploy infrastructure that would be robust enough to underpin this growth and be able to scale rapidly. The company already had a long-running relationship with Dell but also evaluated proposals from HP and NetApp.

Bango’s infrastructure now consists of a Dell Compellent Flash Optimised solution, Dell Networking S-series managed switches and PowerEdge R620 servers, which the company says have improved its overall IT performance and has reduced response times for customers.

COO David Keeling said he was impressed with the care that Dell took to understand the company’s business and make sure they got it right: “We don’t do virtual. Because of the financial nature of our business we choose to buy, host and manage our infrastructure. Although we already had a relationship with Dell we went out to the market as we wanted to make sure we were getting best of breed. Dell took a long time over the analysis and made us think about our technical solution. With this infrastructure we’ll be able to expand to handle the needs of new clients in new markets,” he said. 

The deployment is part of a structured data center strategy which involves rolling out additional data centers to manage the company’s growth.  The company has a data center at Internap in Dallas , at Interxion in London and plans a third data center towards the end of this year. “We’re looking at a Tier III or IV facility,” said Keeling. 

Bango, formed in 1999, raised £6.5m just over 12 months ago with a new share placement and said it would be using the capital to boost business development and expand operations in Asian and American emerging markets such as Brazil and India. Emerging markets have proved to be a focus for the company – most recently it launched direct operator billing for the BlackBerry World Storefront with Saudi Arabian mobile network operator STC. 

Operator billing has a 60% conversion rate compared with 20% for credit cards, according to Bango.