How to deliver a cloud native buying experience

When consumers buy products via self-service channels, they want that fingertip control to select and change products instantly. Communications service providers (CSPs) need to be able to provide that easy and immediate experience while effectively managing the rapid introduction of new product offers and prices to stay customer relevant. It is imperative that order notification and order execution be fast, providing the gratification and satisfaction so eagerly sought by the CSPs’ customers. Enabling a wide array of à la carte service selections, available at any time and independent of traditional billing cycles, very likely results in unpredictable and disproportionate scaling demands to render validated offers and prices, and to execute the eventual orders using dynamic processes. Solving these challenges needs thoughtful consideration. Simply adding a digital API layer over the organization can certainly return quick gains for a few select products and creating a beautifully designed shopping interface is important for ease-of-use and brand representation. However, they only mask the underlying challenges. The business velocity needs to consistently adapt to support the magnitude of: There are a minimum set of technical capabilities needed to achieve such velocity, on-demand scale and low latency pricing, offers and order execution: The secret of success for delivering offering, pricing, and order fulfilment for high-volume, self-service and complex orders is the combination of in-memory technologies, containerisation, open-source software and modern responsive architectural approaches leveraging connectivity, data centricity and advanced analytics.

• Real-time price and offering queries
• Handle consistent price changes and product re-bundling
• Managing the load placed on Systems of Record is altogether a very different proposition.

1. A centrally configurable catalogue to define products, services and their relationships, commercial, technical and pricing rules which are then synced to execution runtime engines for Order Management, price and offers.
2. High volume, low latency online offer and price eligibility, offer and price queries to support the barrage of API queries from self-service channels which can support unpredictable peaks.
3. The decomposition of an order into a dynamically generated sequence of micro-services. Scalable microservices to decouple the auto-generated execution plans from back-end systems enables change.
4. An architecture that supports both low-latency and longer running orders. Low-latency orders are typically online self-service B2C order whereas, longer running orders may include a complex set of dependencies or composed of thousands of order lines.
5. Cloud-native packaging of functional components is essential to enable independent, horizontal component-level scaling with a wide range of platform options for deployment.
6. A hybrid and open integration capability is essential for decoupling systems of record and systems of engagement and these systems may be siloed, legacy, SaaS, on or off premise cloud and so on. Hybrid connectivity supporting TM Forum Open API facilitates flexible, agile change, migration and new product introduction.

Case study

Telkomsel Indonesia with 170 Million subscribers are leveraging high volume, low latency technology in their digital core transformation, to not only deliver blistering throughput in an active/active data configuration, but also hybrid cloud/on-premise integration and CI/CD process support. In a very competitive market Telkomsel, in its first-year, improved time-to-market by threefold, normalize products across channels and is able to support 30,000 API transactions per second to retrieve personalised offers and prices. Tens of thousands of products in an in-memory cache, allows customers to search and quickly find offers tailored to particular geographies, customer types, and price points.