Cloud native order management boosts speed, scale and operational efficiency

Who: Croatia’s Hrvatski Telecom, part of the Deutsche Telekom group, and Prodapt

What: An urgent need to modernize an inflexible, complex order management system that was inhibiting its ability to compete

How: A solution aligned with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs to achieve desired business outcomes

Results:

• Adopted cloud-native and microservices-based solution that resulted in 50% shorter time to market
• 40% better productivity
• 30% more systems availability
• 40% decrease in licensing costs
• Standardized APIs halved the time it would have taken to develop them from scratch.

Over time, Hrvatski Telecom’s (HT’s) legacy order management suite had become operationally complicated and inflexible, and expensive to run. The suite had dozens of sub-processes involving multiple systems, departments, and partner organizations. These difficulties were compounded by heavy customization and multiple features added over a 15-year period.

The system was difficult to scale and led to longer release cycles and multi-faceted dependencies with inadequate visibility of them. It stifled innovation internally and within ecosystems, slowing time to market and hampering business agility. High operating costs, due to licensing fees, and infrastructure and operations requirements affected HT’s competitiveness.

The communications service provider (CSP) wanted to modernize its order management systems and processes to avoid vendor lock-in, shorten release cycles, and get products and services to market faster, in a more agile way.

Microservices architecture

HT wanted to move its order management to being open source, cloud-native and microservices-based, so that it could be scaled easily. The entire open-source order management stack was written from scratch, including key applications like order capture, order execution, product catalog, asset management, user documentation, notifications and more. The stack had more than 120 integration points and included 60 loosely-coupled microservices, which expose business functions. With these requirements in mind, the CSP decided the new solution should align with TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and Open APIs, and comply with the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA). HT used the ODA’s Concepts and Principles (GB998) for the digital platforms and the services they expose. It provided a detailed blueprint for building a standardized, cloud-native software component. To complement the ODA, HT leveraged TM Forum’s Information Framework (also known as SID or GB922) data model, product catalog and interface specifications. Its Business Process Framework (also known as eTOM or GB921) was used to rationalize and align business processes, while the Application Framework (also known as TAM or GB929) was used to map applications. HT’s architecture adhered to the Forum’s guidelines on integration, data management, applications’ architecture, transition architecture and more, plus best practices for cloud-native IT development and deployment, and patterns for use. As part of the architecture, the network operator created a Harmonized API layer (HAL) to give the order management systems plug-and-play interoperability with external systems and partners. The operator referenced TM Forum’s Open APIs (GB992) to identify the Open APIs relevant to the digital platforms for the transformation program. The Open API-based approach exponentially reduces the cost of integration and time to market for new services, plus they can be reused across other DT subsidiaries in other countries. Open APIs also allow HT to expose network and IT capabilities to external ecosystem partners.

The diagram below shows the conceptual architecture of the digital platform-based order management stack built on TM Forum standards.

HT categorizes the APIs based on reusability across Deutsche Telekom’s operating companies in other countries. Category A can be reused as they are, Category B can be reused with some customization and Category C APIS are country specific and cannot be re-used.

Feeling the benefit

Transforming the order management suite to run on a microservices-architecture that was built from scratch using cloud native IT, enabled HT to achieve the following outcomes:

• 50% reduction in time-to-market from using standardized interfaces and services, and adopting the best practices of a continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline and Agile DevOps processes. HT shortened the time to market from two years to nine months. Each service was built to be 100% cloud native so it could exploit cloud capabilities like dynamic scaling and provisioning.
• Using Open APIs halves the time it would normally have taken to produce the APIs from scratch. Now that the APIs and new ways of working are established, future projects are predicted to see the same, if not better, results. Further, some of the APIs and associated integration framework can be reused with little or no customization by DeutscheTelekom’s operating companies in other countries. The use of APIs also smoothed the interoperability with and integration of APIs with other vendors and partners.
• 40% increase in productivity with end-to-end visibility in cloud-native applications. Observability-driven development (ODD), with clear design guidelines, uses data and tooling to observe the state and behavior of a system before, during and after development to detect issues with user experience issues or bugs. Using a cloud version of the application monitoring tool, HT established unified visibility across the ecosystem that provides actionable insights. This improves overall productivity and operational efficiency.
• 30% improvement in system availability derived from identifying performance and debugging issues and defects: Timely resolution is a key issue in cloud-native distributed systems. Employing an application performance monitoring (APM) tool delivered three-fold improvements in incident detection and resolution time. This increased reliability means HT can deliver on service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs), whereas the legacy system did not have SLAs.
• Better customer experience is due to an omnichannel approach and responsive graphical user interfaces (GUIs) based on Angular JS. Responses are quicker in the channels as the integration framework interacts with fewer systems. As outlined above, the observability framework reduced the time taken to identify issues, boosted application uptime and optimized performance issues. The resultant better customer experience will help cut churn and improve customers’ return rates.
• 40% reduction in licensing costs as the company no longer needs licenses from vendors of different OSS/BSS platforms. This also significantly helped HT reduce IT budgets for integration and customization, and freed it to focus more on innovation.
• HT has realized many performance improvements by using Angular JS technology. For example, at a high level, the technology supports centralized, catalog-driven order management – customer, billing and service-facing resources. On a more detailed level, for instance, the front-end streamlines and improves screen-loading time by 66% in the order capture application since moving from Ember to Angular JS.
• The agile business operating model adapts quickly to market changes – internally and externally – using a lean start-up methodology. It helps HT to respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands in a productive and cost-effective way, without compromising quality.
• The container-based IT development, orchestration, and deployment of microservices with an automated continuous integration and development (CI/CD) pipeline and Agile DevOps processes delivered a 30% improvement in end-to-end deployment time. The simplified, end-to-end DevOps pipeline reduced the deployment time from between 40 and 60 minutes to between 10 and 15 minutes.
• Setting up the new environment was optimized to take 66% less time, falling from three weeks to one. The automated code now takes three seconds instead of 30 minutes to deploy using Liquibase.

"Croatia is a tourist-friendly country, we see a spike in tourists during summer which leads to more demand for connectivity services, hence the technology we use and the solutions we have must be scalable. The current architecture and systems that we have built will enable us to scale capacity with traffic, deliver new offers faster in a seamless and automated manner.” Frederic Nin, Director – IT and Digital, Hrvatski Telekom, a DT Group Company.