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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
opportunity was taken to provide a significant improvement in delivery
capacity, driven by major changes in the corporate landscape: |
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the
breakup of the very large group into separate public corporations,
of which the old IT services group was one |
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the
desire of the new IT services group to use an ASP charging model |
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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:
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provide
a long-term basis for business-to-business transactions |
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support
'internal' and 'external' clients with the same architecture |
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support
reusability of software behind the services, to reduce costs and timescales |
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handle
increasingly complex transactions without extending development times |
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reduce
delivery costs and timescales dramatically |
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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: |
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proof
of concepts for different layers of the new design |
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system
definition - detailed documentation of the interfaces, contents and
patterns of use and construction for each layer |
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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.
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