VHA moves to event-driven provisioning platform

Vodafone Hutchison Australia (VHA) has implemented a real-time event-driven order management platform to support the company’s growth in Australia.

VHA, which provides services to more than six million customers, has updated its provisioning application to Tibco Software’s BusinessEvents. The idea is to provide a scalable architecture to reliably and quickly deal with high volume transaction loads. The telco has also used its new enterprise service bus backbone to take advantage of service-oriented architecture capabilities and bring services to market faster and reduce operational costs.

The new platform will allow VHA to quickly provision phones in an increasingly complex mobile environment. It is based around a concept Tibco founder and chief executive officer, Vivek Ranadive, calls “the two second advantage” — that businesses are better off knowing small but targeted amounts of information in real time than comprehensive data six months after the event.

“There are three components to the technology; we provide the nervous system for about 3000 companies,” Ranadive explained. “[The first component] connects everything and allows you to look at events and connect them in real time. The second component lets you look at those events and start anticipating what is going to happen. Again, you can apply that in real time. The third component is business process management.

“Those three components are in use by Vodafone where out back leg connects everything, our BusinessEvents engine looks at the events and applies the rules that apply for that customer and then the business process management capability provisions that customer in real time — while they are still in the store.”

A typical provisioning process for a mobile phone involves activating the customer profile using a front-end application. It links to more than a dozen systems to execute 55 business processes for billing, voicemail, mobile number portability, international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) management as well as credit scoring and other functions.

The VHA implementation took six-and-a-half months.

“We needed a dynamic platform that could support our continued growth, improve our flexibility to support new products and services, and ensure sustained reliability for one of our core business processes,” Nathan Chandler, head of BSS IT strategy at VHA, said in a statement. “The TIBCO solution delivered above and beyond our expectations.”