Hong Kong"s telecommunications market is world-famous for fierce competition. The HKSAR has yet to serve as host for the popular Darwinian entertainment reality TV show Survivor, but then again, we do have the telco arena.

To survive on this electronic battlefield, New World Telecommunications Ltd. (NWT) made a sharp turn in business direction about five years ago, moving from voice-centric services to data-centric ones. But when the carrier transformed its business, NWT needed not only to reform its business structure, but also its IT system.

"The previous system, used since 1995, was built for serving a voice-centric business," said Samuel Poon, director of technology and development at NWT. "To fit our new business need, we needed to restructure the entire IT system."

He noted the previous system was a one-layer application architecture, meaning any changes within the application required program coding. As the carrier moved into the data-centric business, customization and speed of delivery became essential for the business.

The perfect system

To meet these requirements, the new system needed to replace the billing systems, the CRM application and the operation system, which controls the telecommunication system switches according to business needs. But more importantly, these applications had to integrate with each other to automate the delivery process, said Poon.

"We needed to integrate our order processing system with the operation system to automate the billing process," he said. "These also (had to mesh) with the CRM applications, allowing our customer representative to understand each customer"s purchase history and payment status in real time."

In addition, the system needed to be flexible enough to allow the carrier to develop new products easily. Meanwhile, the application server layer needed to be stable and the user interface needed to be easy and simple enough for the business users.

"We were looking for package software at the beginning, but none of them met our needs, therefore we decided to develop our own," he noted.

After six months of discussion among the executives on detail business logics and technical requirements, the team came up with the new application architecture. The three-tier architecture consists of the database layer (powered by an Oracle 9i database), the application server layer, and the front-end interface for users.

For a more stable application server layer, NWT decided to use J2EE to build the applications. But at the same time, to allow its 300 users from the customer services, sales, finance and engineering department better understand the applications, the front-end was built using Microsoft"s .Net.

Beyond development tools

As the company started shopping for application tools, Poon realized Borland"s application lifecycle management (ALM) suite is the company"s only choice in the market.

"We had no other options available, since Borland was the only vendor to support both .Net and Java," said Poon.

Nevertheless, he noted NWT needed not only a set of development tools, but also tools to manage, monitor and optimize the performance of these applications.

"Borland"s suite covers the entire application lifecycle," he noted. "ALM is like a loop, it starts from the design of the application, then the development and deployment. But to enhance the system, it often goes back the designing stage."

To support NWT"s system transformation, the company used Borland"s EnterpriseServer to support the application server infrastructure and JBuilder for application development. To support the interoperability between the .Net front-end and J2EE back-end, NWT used Borland"s Jenava. Borland"s Optimizeit ServerTrace completed the application lifecycle by monitoring and enhancing the application performance.

A rewarding result

The result was impressive, according to Poon.

With a set of well defined business requirements and implementing Borland"s ALM suite, he noted, the company was able to complete the development in six months, bringing the first launch of the system within a year since the project begin.

Moreover, with a new three-tier architecture, NWT is able to develop new products and services in a much shorter time.

"We are now able to launch a new product in three weeks instead of three months," he noted. "Similarly, we can kick-start a marketing campaign in two to three days and it used to take weeks."

Poon explained the architecture allows the team to develop new products simply by changing configurations, without the need for any program coding. With the team"s self-built workflow engine, he noted, the development of business workflow is automated whenever a service is launched.

"We are having new products or new marketing campaign almost every other week," he added. "The new system is critical for our survival in this competitive market."

Since the system was formally launched in early 2003, NWT"s data business revenue contribution has grown from zero to 40 percent. In the last fiscal year, June 2003 to July 2004, the carrier"s data business recorded a 62 percent growth.

The successful implementation allowed NWT to win the Customer Application of the Year Award at Borland"s annual user conference last year. The award winners were selected by a team of Borland executives, product managers, sales managers, customers and developer community members to honor companies for their success in designing, developing and deploying the software.

But the reward did not come easy, Poon added. He attributed the success to well designed business logic.

"One of the biggest challenges is the business logic design," he said. "We needed a system that was flexible enough to launch any kind of new service, but at the same time, we had no idea what kind of services would be needed."

A team of business executives that understand the business need within the telecommunication industry is therefore essential for the success of the system.