Customer: 3
Industry: Mobile Telecoms Network Operator
Deployment Country: UK
Solution: Centralizing federated services security to enable the improved provisioning and on-boarding of mobile customers via third party retail sales channels.

Introduction:
3 is a communications company focused on bringing the benefits of the internet to mobile communications. 3 launched the UK's first 3G network offering national coverage for calls and texts, and has over 91% population coverage for 3G services. 3 has over 4.4 million active customers in the UK and over 20 million worldwide.

Business Objective:
3 wanted to improve its operational efficiencies by centralizing the management of high value business transactions associated with the provisioning of new customers via retail sales partners and virtual mobile network operators (MVNO). The ultimate objective was to accelerate the on-boarding of new customers and improve the entire business transaction process between 3 and its partners, thus making it easier to do business with 3.

Business Challenge:
3 faced several business challenges in delivering on its commercial objective. They needed to:

  • Protect valuable revenue streams by ensuring an extremely high level of resiliency and service availability to all partners.
  • Increase operational efficiencies by facilitating an improved partner and customer provisioning (e.g. creation of users in CRM, provisioning of handsets, remote care set up and payment services protection etc).
  • Reduce the overall testing and development lifecycle of new services in order to have a quicker time to market.

Technical Challenge:
3 also had to overcome several technical challenges.

Many services were exposed independently to third parties and, furthermore, service developers were creating functionality that was deeply embedded into these individual applications rather than abstracting this functionality in a componentized manner.

Additionally, sensitive partner information was hosted in multiple disparate silos, resulting in a lack of transparency and waste of IT assets.

3 chose to implement a services oriented approach based on federated XML Web Services to address and rationalize the technical architecture issues, and to ease the exposure of new services to partners. This also necessitated a security framework that would protect the exchange of high value business critical information with its partner organisations.

Also, dependent upon the demand from partners and end-users in response to its various promotional campaigns, the virtual MNO had to be able to scale up and down the availability of its services and IT assets.

Finally, 3 needed to reduce the overall time to market of new services and to do this sought product architecture that would enable service integration, development, testing and production roll out.

Benefits/Results:
3 implemented the Vordel Gateway to address its technical challenges and was also able to deliver on its commercial objectives. Benefits realized included:

Service Lifecycle Benefits: Accelerated time to market for new services as a result of the reduced test, development and deployment lifecycles.

Improved customer sign-up: Easier management of partners and improved provisioning of end user customers via the centralized security policy implementation for federated services across all partners

Increased availability: Improved response rates and partner experience via the throttling of service availability in response to customer demand levels

Monitoring and Governance: The Vordel Gateways provide a feed of service usage and performance metrics, which are fed to the Vordel Reporter product. This provides 3 with visibility into how their user and partner provisioning services are being used. Reports include:

  • Number of requests per service per month
  • Total number of requests per partner per month
  • Number of requests per partner per service in a given period

Root Cause Analysis:
The Vordel Reporter reporting structure provides the way to identify common failure points in multi-service transactions. This means that if one service is failing, and impacting the transaction as a whole, the Vordel infrastructure detects this and notifies 3.