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“It’s critical for us to be able to manage the rapid growth and
massive volume that continue to characterize our business, and NonStop systems definitely help us do so.”
Ray Oehley, executive head, Billing Systems Division, Vodacom
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When it went live in 1994, South
African cellular communications
leader Vodacom fully expected a
robust and enthusiastic take-up of its
services. Market analysis suggested
that half a million subscribers
would be on its rolls within 10
years, and the company sized its
network, mediation, and billing
systems accordingly.
The robustness and enthusiasm
were there, all right. Today, less
than 10 years out of the gate,
Vodacom boasts close to 9 million
subscribers—significantly more than
its nearest rival in the mobile communications
space, and twice as
many as the country’s fixed-line
monopoly, Telkom SA. Fortunately,
the continuous availability and linear
scalability of the company’s HP
NonStop servers have enabled
Vodacom to provide uninterrupted
service to its customers, despite
exponential growth and the burgeoning
demand for new services.
Vodacom uses NonStop servers
for both upstream call control and
downstream event management
and reporting. “At the network
level, our function is mainly call
management and, to some degree,
subscriber control,” explained Maxim
Naidoo, manager of IN development
and strategy. “Once the subscriber’s
interaction with the core
network has been completed, we
generate a series of downstream
events that trigger the financial
systems and translate the call activity
into revenue. The information is
also mined to support fraud detection
and near real-time customer
care interaction.”
“The network side focuses on
the online management of the traffic,”
concurred Ray Oehley, executive
head of the Billing Systems Division.
“On the other side is the offline
management of the call detail
records, including billing, financial
and usage reporting, and market
analysis. We’re beginning to see an
increased need for real-time billing,
however, especially in our extensive
prepaid market. Online call
rating will allow for greater control
and less fraud in this environment.”
Vodacom takes full advantage of
HP’s broad portfolio of computing
solutions. The company’s Recharge
Management System (RMS) is based
on HP ProLiant servers, and its core
financial processing activities rely
on a large installed base of HP
AlphaServer systems. In addition,
Vodacom has standardized on HP
printers and personal computers,
with the exception of some locally
sourced laptops. “We have worked
quite hard with HP to establish a
corporatewide business relationship,”
said Naidoo. |
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Project manager Gerard Cannoo
oversees key initiatives in the area
of mediation, which integrates the
upstream switches and the downstream
billing and other client
systems. “Mediation means taking
the data in, checking its integrity,
and converting it into a common
format,” he explained. “It involves
aggregation—adding value to the
data by associating call data with
subscriber data and account profiles—and also the preparation of
the data for batch-mode delivery.”
Mediation provides the interface
between the network elements,
where calls are handled and call
data is generated, and downstream
applications (for example, fraud,
billing, and archiving) that require
event and usage data. It also
includes the Interconnect Accounting
System, which determines the correct
revenue apportionment for different
operators—other mobile service
providers, the fixed-line operator, and
any international roaming component—involved in a given call. Vodacom’s
mediation system consists of Verizon
UMS software (customized for local
operation) running on a geographically
separated pair of NonStop
S86008 servers. The system also
includes HP ServerNet Wide Area
Network (SWAN) controllers for
connection to the X.25 network.
“The mediation side needed to
always be there,” noted Oehley. “If
we cannot poll data from one of
our switches, we’re likely to lose
that revenue. Our switches use a
‘ring buffer’; data is written into the
buffer continuously, and it overwrites
itself once it’s full. We have to
extract data from the buffer before
the tail comes around, so the continuous
availability of the NonStop
platform—coupled with the ability
to expand the system as needed—was viewed as a huge benefit.” |
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The linear scalability of the NonStop
platform has also been a huge
benefit on the network side. “In 1996,
Vodacom selected an application
from Global One (now Interact) to
handle subscriber life-cycle and
voucher management,” said Maxim
Naidoo. “We wanted something
that could match the rest of the
network in terms of robustness—something that was redundant, reliable,
and always available. So the fact that
the Global One application ran on the
NonStop platform was a definite plus.”
In 2001, Vodacom added location-based
services to its portfolio, using
HP OpenCall Intelligent Network
Server (INS) software on the NonStop
platform. And in 2002, the company
purchased Telecommunications Service
Creation Environment (TSCE) software
from HP. “This gave us the
opportunity not only to buy and
implement IN-based applications,
but also to create these applications
on our own,” said Naidoo. “We now
have the ability to develop our own
services and deploy them very
quickly, at a fraction of the cost that
mainstream vendors would charge
for them. Using one or two resources,
we can develop a network efficiency
application or a new subscriber feature,
and deploy it to the network within
a matter of weeks.”
The move toward more internal
development represents a massive
cost saving for Vodacom. “So far, in
the three services that we’ve managed
to implement, we expect something
on the order of $5 million in savings
compared to the previous systems,”
continued Naidoo. “We've also dramatically
reduced the licensing cost
for those applications, and that has
been a big win for us.” Vodacom's
prepaid front-end and service control
point (SCP) systems comprise a
combination of NonStop S74000 and
S86000 servers.
Vodacom enjoys a dominant position
in the South African cellular
market, but the company is not
stopping there; projects are ongoing
to extend its reach throughout the
continent. With operations in Tanzania,
the Democratic Republic of Congo,
Lesotho, and Mozambique, and the
likelihood of a license-sharing
arrangement in Nigeria, Vodacom
is clearly a major force in today’s
global telecommunications market.
HP NonStop servers will continue
to play a vital role in Vodacom’s
growing success. “At Vodacom, we
want our different business domains
to be seamlessly integrated, in real
time,” concluded Naidoo. “The way
to achieve this is through online
transaction processing, and the
NonStop platform is a key element
in our strategy to achieve this
important goal.”
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