The business case
The client, a large telecommunications organisation, needed to migrate its mid-tier systems away from DCE, which was becoming unsupportable, to continue serving customers in a changing environment.

	the breakup of the very large group into separate public corporations, of which the old IT services group was one
	the desire of the new IT services group to use an ASP charging model
	the increase in B2B transactions between the new corporations and their suppliers.

The technical case
The new mid-tier systems, being the only point of access to the corporate mainframes, needed to:

	provide a long-term basis for business-to-business transactions
	support 'internal' and 'external' clients with the same architecture
	support reusability of software behind the services, to reduce costs and timescales
	handle increasingly complex transactions without extending development times
	reduce delivery costs and timescales dramatically
	meet demanding SLA's for reliability, scalability, security and end-to-end management.

Our input
NT/e provided the technical design authority, spearheading the team that defined, proved and rolled out the new mid-tier systems. NT/e had responsibility for timely delivery of the architecture definition.

The major deliverables, stretching over the course of a year, were:
	proof of concepts for different layers of the new design
	system definition - detailed documentation of the interfaces, contents and patterns of use and construction for each layer
	initial deliveries to two teams.

Results/benefits
The delivered architecture was highly scaleable and resilient, allowed substitution at different levels of the architecture, and provided a software architecture for reuse of business functionality and stylised business processes.

Each incremental delivery of business functionality used existing business functions and infrastructure, dramatically reducing the amount of new software.