Read how BPM and SOA projects can help accelerate telecom company growth and achieve better, more flexible, and more knowledge-based operations. These enhancements can improve customer service quality and efficiency, while addressing the company's business and technology needs.

BACKGROUND

GVT, a Brazilian communications company established in 2000, supplies telephony, data, and Internet services to one million clients throughout Brazil. The company has been very successful and has grown rapidly. GVT recently issued a very lucrative stock offering on the Brazilian stock market, and is expected to experience significant financial growth in the coming years.

THE CHALLENGE

The company’s swift expansion demanded quick, high quality solutions to the organization’s business and technology needs.
When selecting and implementing information systems, GVT chose a best-of-breed strategy. Because of this, the company purchased and developed a number of individual systems to support operations and the company’s rapid growth. These systems included customer relationship management (CRM),  billing, enterprise resource management (ERP), provisioning, and others.
With changes in regulatory, commercial, and sales and marketing needs, along with the introduction of new technologies, the company decided that a new integrated system architecture was needed.

THE SOLUTION

The solution incorporated two main strategies:

• Making rich legacy system functionality available in a convenient and universal form, irrespective of location. This availability enabled sophisticated application development using the company's existing assets, quickly and easily.
• Using business process analysis (BPA), business process management (BPM) and business application management (BAM) tools to create a important bridge between the organization's business rules and the technical implementation.

This implementation was conducted and managed by eWave do Brasil, eWave’s South American subsidiary. The project introduced a pioneering approach at the time - introducing an ESB (enterprise service bus) system, to manage a large number service-oriented architecture (SOA) services in real-time. This approach “hid” the disparate information systems, and merged the services so that catalog and customer information would be individualized and integrated.

The BPM was implemented on top of the new service platform in order to manage business procedures planned using the BPA tool and monitored by BAM tools.

In addition to the success of the entire implementation, the project succeeded in developing a uniform and flexible front-end portal to the legacy system while integrating systems and managing complex data duplication.

THE RESULTS
  
The project went live in 2006. It was presented at the 2007 Gartner Application Integration and Web Services Summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil, under the topic of SOA. The implementation is now well-known and a frequently cited example throughout Brazil as the most successful SOA implementation. The operational control and flexibility accomplished were very impressive. Now, starting at the planning stage, every new GVT business need can be examined by the BPA system.

The changes implemented by the IT department were a quick, quality solution to the organization's needs. Thanks to this project, GVT can offer an outstanding level of service to its customers, and has improved its competitive position in the dynamic media market, one of the largest and fastest expanding markets in the world economy.