4-page Case Study - Posted 5/8/2007

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T-Com

Internet Service Provider Reduces Time-to-Market for New Services by 40 Percent

T-Com, a division of Deutsche Telekom, is one of the largest broadband and fixed-network providers in Europe. Previously, T-Com provided value-added network services like Web hosting to customers using a system that was difficult and costly to maintain and update. To enhance its position in the competitive telecommunications industry, T-Com needed to decrease the time it took to get new services to market while keeping costs down. The company turned to Sapient, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to build a centralized, automated provisioning system based on a service-oriented architecture. T-Com makes these real-world business processes possible with Microsoft BizTalk® Server. The new system is able to handle 10 times more customers than the previous system and has reduced provisioning costs by 10-15 percent. T-Com also can bring new services to market 40 percent faster than before.

Situation

The new system enables T-Com to react in a fast, flexible, and cost-efficient way to changing market conditions for hosted, value-added services.  Dirk Wöhning Business Engineering Value Added Services T-Com

T-Com provides customers with hosting for e-mail accounts, Web sites, online shops, and chat rooms. In 2003, the company supplied those services using a process that was complex and costly. For example, when a customer purchased services, provisioning requests went through various service vendors running different platforms. In addition, T-Com manually validated the data given by the customer. As a result, it took two days to provide a customer with service.

In some cases, the provisioning process failed. For example, the system sometimes was unable to process long-running transactions, such as registering a domain name, which can take days or weeks to complete because of legal requirements. If the system did not process requests correctly, customers would not receive access to the services they purchased. The customers then had to call the T-Com help desk to resolve the problem.

Because of the strong growth occurring in the broadband communications market at the time, T-Com wanted to attract more customers and keep its current customers happy by offering new Internet services. However, the existing system was not designed for quick and easy expandability. T-Com had to custom-build each new service, and the system lacked clear separation between business and operational functions. Because of this complexity, T-Com needed several months of development and testing to bring new Internet services to market.

“New services were too expensive to be profitable,” says Dirk Wöhning, Business Engineering Value Added Services at T-Com. “We needed to be able to add services easily and cost-effectively.”

Solution

T-Com decided to redesign its provisioning system. In November 2003, the company turned to Sapient, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, for assistance. Sapient helps clients innovate in the areas of marketing, business operations, and technology. Founded in 1990, Sapient is headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and operates across North America, Europe, and India.

After evaluating the existing T-Com system, a team of Sapient specialists in Germany and India worked with T-Com to create objectives for the solution. They determined that the new system must:

Since the OSS was brought online, it has provisioned more than 400,000 Web sites for our customers. In the same amount of time, T-Com has saved between 10 and 15 percent in provisioning costs.  Dirk Wöhning Business Engineering Value Added Services T-Com

• Reduce the time-to-market for new Internet services.
• Be able to handle at least 100,000 new customers a month.
• Lower provisioning costs.
• Reduce help-desk costs.
• Allow services to be created by any vendor on any platform.

T-Com and Sapient decided to build the solution on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), with e-mail, shop, domain, and chat services exposed as XML-based Web services. SOA provides flexibility and speeds development because services are independent of each other, can be reused, and can be aggregated into larger composite services.

The team chose Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2004 to be the core framework. “BizTalk Server 2004 was a perfect fit with our design objectives in many respects,” says Abhishek Bhattacharya, Senior Manager of Technology at Sapient. “It provided long-running transactions, business process orchestrations, and messaging. It also provided good Web service support and support for protocols like HTTP and FTP. These functions worked together seamlessly.”

In a period of four months, T-Com and Sapient developed and tested the solution—an automated, centralized provisioning system called the Operational Support System (OSS). Using BizTalk Server as the business-process layer, the OSS orchestrates all aspects of Internet service delivery and maintenance. T-Com and Sapient modeled T-Com business processes using BizTalk Orchestration Designer. “A good business process modeling tool was crucial in being able to fine-tune the OSS to T-Com-specific business processes, and that’s what we used BizTalk Server for,” says Bhattacharya.

To develop the solution, T-Com and Sapient also used the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system. The solution includes several server computers running BizTalk Server on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database software configured in active-passive clusters stores 10 gigabytes of data. BizTalk Server runs 18 different orchestrations to process an average of three customer transactions a second.

To add services to the system, T-Com uses configuration scripts containing XML and XSLT code stored in SQL Server 2000 databases. T-Com or its service vendors edit these documents to create new Internet services and packages. This makes creating services faster by eliminating the need to create custom code. Additionally, these configuration scripts give T-Com the ability to completely automate the provisioning process.

T-Com has provisioned 400,000 Web sites with the new system since it went live in November 2004.

Benefits

The solution’s flexible, scalable architecture has helped T-Com reduce the time-to-market for new services by 40 percent. The new system can handle 10 times more customers than the previous system. T-Com has reduced provisioning and help-desk costs by 10–15 percent. And T-Com now has the ability to react more quickly to changing market conditions, so it can more readily meet customer expectations and expand its share of the European telecommunications market.

Reduced Time-to-Market for New Services by 40 Percent

The service-oriented architecture of the OSS makes it possible for T-Com to quickly expose and compose services no matter what their underlying technology and with minimal impact to the rest of the system. T-Com can produce new services by editing and running XML-based configuration scripts. Also, the OSS allows T-Com to combine existing services into new products and make them consumable by the customers more quickly. Wöhning says T-Com has reduced the time-to-market by 40 percent. For example, a new service that allows customers to design and maintain their own databases went from initial design to customer availability in only three months.

Improved System Performance Tenfold

The automated, centralized system handles 10 times more customers than the previous system. “The OSS has achieved its design objective of processing 100,000 new account requests a month,” says Wöhning. And while it took two days to provision services for a customer with the previous system, the new system completes that process in an hour.

Reduced Provisioning Costs by 10–15 Percent

The new configuration process, based on XML and XSLT scripts, has made it possible for T-Com to completely automate provisioning, making it faster while reducing its cost. Wöhning says, “Since the OSS was brought online, it has provisioned more than 400,000 Web sites for our customers. In the same amount of time, T-Com has saved between 10 and 15 percent in provisioning costs.”

Reduced Help-Desk Costs by 10–15 Percent

Support for long-running transactions in BizTalk Server has resulted in fewer provisioning processes being dropped by the system and fewer calls to the T-Com help desk as a result. “With BizTalk Server, we have also reduced our help-desk costs by 10–15 percent,” says Wöhning.

BizTalk Server has played a crucial role in the success of the OSS. “Without BizTalk Server, developing and implementing the solution would not have been possible,” says Bhattacharya. And according to Wöhning, “The new system enables T-Com to react in a fast, flexible, and cost-efficient way to changing market conditions for hosted, value-added services.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Sapient Corporation products and services, call (617) 621-0200 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.sapient.com/

For more information about T-Com Corporation products and services, call +49 6151 6800 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.t-com.de/

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2007