Tier 1 US Multiple System Cable Operator
This Multiple System Cable Operator (MSO) provides video, high speed data, digital telephony, and cellular services to consumer and SMB customers in geographicaly distinct and diverse locations around the United States.
Business Challenges
The company has several business challenges that drive its technical and product decisions. It is seeing increased competition from non-traditional players, larger and more disparate services delivered via growing numbers of channels, a customer and market driven requirement to offer wireless services with no clear growth strategy, and increasing awareness that off-the-shelf converged architectures do not exist.
Technical Challenges
The company's technical infrastructure needs to be transformed in order to meet those business challenges. Systems and software are dated and need to be re-engineered to take advantage of SOA enabled systems being provided by vendors. Much of the company's internally developed software is based on hard-coded assumptions instead of configurable parameters. This means that a minor change requires a code release which greatly increases development cycles and dependencies. Legacy systems are also siloed which means it may be impossible to deliver a single product via multiple delivery channels. One of the more significant examples is the inability of billing and customer care systems to deal with new and emerging business requirements.
Strategy Going Forward
The company decided that its business strategy would be to deploy a wireless offering as quickly as possible, upgrade its infrastructure, converge services and delivery channels where reasonable, and bundle all services on one invoice; all while protecting existing service revenues and maximizing existing investments.
Actions Taken
CAS Group took several actions once it was engaged by the company. It conducted interviews with business owners to understand business objectives and gathered requirements. Once these were understood, CAS Group analyzed existing systems and infrastructure for their ability to support those requirements. Where that infrastructure was inadequate CAS Group created an architectural road map with the objective of minimizing impact of existing systems and process due to the changes and reduce risk to new launches. Where the company's infrastructure was lacking CAS Group created and administered a competitive RFP, helped broker software and pricing negotiations, and helped select a systems integrator to deliver the solution.
Results/Benefits
Externally Converged Wireless Offering
In order to deploy a wireless service without disturbing existing systems, CAS Group helped the company deploy a separate wireless infrastructure. By interfacing this separate infrastructure to certain key legacy systems such as sales, customer care, provisioning adn billing the service as delivered was able to provide an essentially converged offering to the customer.
Helped Create New Infrastructure
To ensure that product rollouts became cheaper over time, CAS Group helped the company establish new IT infrastructure that adhered to a modern architecture capable of dealing with multiple products/channels. A major part of this was an enterprise product "catalog" that included the API documentation necessary to break down barriers between existing silos. This catalog was used to prioritize an ordering, billing, and customer care convergence "layer". Where necessary CAS Group did aid in architecting and deploying IMS based systems, but only where necessary. The result was an application infrastructure capable of supporting MVNO, MNO, and legacy MSO products. By re-using key legacy systems where appropriate, the compay was able to deploy converged products without disturbing existing deployments or neglecting existing investments.
Deployment Strategies
One of the issues CAS Group identified was the difficulty the company had with timely deployments due to a complicated release processes and component dependencies. Instead of attempting to fix these dependencies prior to release, CAS Group helped the company develop a product timeline that took industry and market context into account. Where possible the company was able to focus on industry parity in its first release while it was working to ensure that future releases were able to increase the release velocity necessary to stay ahead of the industry.
Re-Use of Legacy Systems
As with most MSOs, the company had many legacy systems that assumed an analog-only video marketplace. Many had been rigged to handle highspeed data services but few can deal with federated content or interactive applications. Where possible CAS Group helped the company identify modifications to these systems to allow them to compartmentalize their legacy views of products and systems. This allowed for lower development costs, faster time-to-market, lower business process interruption, and adherence to a support model that the customer has come to rely on.
Knowledge Transfer
One of the core values of CAS Group is that after an engagement the company should have the knowledge necessary to continue on their own. CAS Group does not attempt to create a dependency relationship with a client. In this case CAS Group worked to insure that client staff were key participants in the entire process. This lead to the staff having a clearer understanding of the wireless industry, the resulting architecture and systems, and the operational support model.