Connectivity Management
Background
A global information services provider (ISP) outsourced its connectivity requirements to the national carrier. In turn, the national carrier appointed a team of 6 to provide Service Provisioning and all onward connectivity to the ISP’s customers. This included working with other carriers to provide an end-to-end service in multiple geographies.
The original plan was to automate the application provisioning through the established Operations Orchestrator. It was quickly identified that the current orchestrator was subject to a scaling challenge when connecting up all of the process elements, other vendors and complex rules that are required when delivering this type of service. The solution quickly showed fragility and developed significant escape rates, or fall-out. It was incapable of being a reliable, scalable tool within the process to service provision at this scale and sophistication. Additionally, escape rates were not addressed quickly, and this led to as many people managing the failures as were previously doing the provisioning.
The outsourced solution was also taking a very long time, averaging more than 14 weeks, at the end of which the Service may not necessarily be correctly provisioned either.
There were further impacts on the Data Centre team and Front line engineers who were facing growing criticism and pressures from clients. The poor working environment resulted in some significant employee churn, exceeding 130% each year, which is both expensive and materially impactful on general productivity.
The result was a dissatisfied ISP, who was now subject to both reputational and revenue impact.
Objectives
The ISP needed a stepped change and quickly as its business needed to continue, and connectivity is a critical factor. As such, it put it’s supplier on notice ot its intention to insource what it had previously outsourced to them citing SLA failures.
In parallel, it instructed an in-house development team to devise a solution and invited We Are CORTEX to competitively position CORTEX. Having two alternatives working on this business-critical area reassured the ISP that they would have a viable alternative at the end of their re-evaluation stage.
Solution
Both We Are CORTEX and in-house team set to the solution and worked with the national carrier to determine configurations and development requirements. CORTEX lacked a single aspect of the solution in terms of a specific portal capability so opted to interface with an Open Source solution that the ISP preferred. The in-house team set about their project. A review was held at the end of month 3.
The in-house team presented a complete and accurate solution and the appropriate architecture to the stakeholders. CORTEX demonstrated a working solution at MVP stage, and visualised the architecture and all technical aspects to the Stakeholders. The solution was tested and put into production as the interim solution for the ISP, which allowed the in-house team to continue their build process for a further period.
Three months later, the in-house team was halted after requesting a substantial increase in funding and wider team resources. CORTEX was the default solution.
By this time, the CORTEX solution was decomposing Orders from the ISP’s Seibel solution and configuring the network and application services. The open-source portal was now being used to present different dimensions of data to distinct consumer groups, be they external customers of the ISP or internal teams servicing the ISP’s customers, engineering, supporting, or analysing the various services.
Service exceptions were few, and when presented in the portal, engineers could evaluate and provide additional configuration in CORTEX to autonomously automate that same exception in the future.
As the solution matured, additional connectivity partners could be added to the solution.
Outcomes
The ISP scaled the connectivity supply chain quickly and reliably, from less than 10 connectivity partners and last-mile partnerships in the first year, to more than 190 globally during the second. This was motivated by the significant financial gains which can be leveraged through competitive routing plans; to find the most financially viable partner for each requirement. This also allowed for the selection of more agile connectivity partners, and reduced Service Provisioning lead times to less than 2 weeks.
As data dimensions were added to help manage all connectivity partners, SLAs and associated performance management factors, the ISP was now on top of SLA failure penalty data, and used this to assist their own vendor managers. The ISP was able to reclaim more than $150m each year in downstream service failures. Importantly, Service Provisioning substantially improved to be considered class-leading.
Design to deploy time - 3 months to achieve MVP and a further 6 months to reach full maturity on the initial vendor stack. The additional vendors were added in year 2 onwards.
Approximate Software Cost - $300k per year, and $1.5m of professional services over three years.
Return on investment – Month 12, the first full month of measurement.