Achieving Operational Excellence in Telco through Legacy-to-Cloud BSS/OSS Migration on AWS

A leading Telecom company in the United States was grappling with significant challenges due to outdated, siloed and inefficient technology systems. The company’s Tech and Business operations were bogged down by slow, clunky systems, and old technologies that caused long query times, which led to delayed reports and analytics.

Different teams were trapped in silos, working with slow systems that couldn’t keep up with the fast-paced nature of the telecom business along with internal business and industry demands.

The company wasn’t agile enough to meet customer expectations, roll out new products and react to competition. At this time the company management decided to call an expert and migrate the tech infrastructure to the cloud to bring the much-needed speed to tech, business and marketing operations.

Sincera Technologies was shortlisted and invited to handle the challenge.

Tasked with the monumental job of moving everything to the cloud, our goals were clear: eliminate redundancy, modernize technology, and save as much as you can. We aimed to bring faster, more efficient systems, improve feature velocity, and reduce time to market, all while cutting costs and preparing the company for future growth.

The results were extraordinary. Sincera not only revamped the company’s entire infrastructure but also saved $500 Million, doubled productivity, and increased subscriber numbers by 150%. Read on to discover our approach and how we planned to succeed.

The Strategy Room

The client’s extensive network spans 160 countries, managing over 2700 different products, and employing various technologies across 20 billing systems and 11 e-commerce portals.

The scope of the project included Billing systems, Order entry and management, Inventory and provisioning platforms, multiple products, networking technologies and e-commerce sites.

The journey began with an in-depth analysis of the existing systems data, apps, and services, people involved, vendors and departments. The planning stage was thorough and involved over twenty teams from the client’s end.

What makes this project unique is not only the technology but the people and groups needed to work together, including different departments within the company, vendors providing applications, and various tools and platforms.

This phase was crucial, understanding the ‘as-is’ landscape was imperative to architecting the ‘to-be’ state that would not only resolve the current inefficiencies but also future-proof the entire organization.

Architecting the Transformation

In partnership with AWS, Sincera set out to completely upgrade the client’s infrastructure, focusing on serverless computing with AWS Lambda and container management with Amazon ECS.

Our plan included several key elements:

• High-capacity data processing with AWS tools.
• Flexible microservices using advanced container technology.
• Infrastructure setup using AWS CloudFormation to automate processes.
• Using Amazon QuickSight for better data analysis.
• Applying Amazon SageMaker for machine learning projects.

What was at Stake was Huge

It touched over 100 million customers, and 30 billion transactions each day. Involved handling over 100 terabytes of data with a peak load of up to 4,000 transactions per second.

Sincera’s cloud solutions team did an in-depth analysis, looking at over 2,000 specific requirements for BSS/OSS systems and comparing the current and future setups, including costs and usage.

Execution with Precision

In the execution phase of our transformation, we along with AWS teams adopted a phased approach to minimize disruptions across the network.

In a significant step, we migrated the video streaming functions to Amazon ECS, a managed container orchestration service, which allowed for more streamlined operations, better scalability and high availability.

We also employed EC2 Spot Instances for handling non-production workloads, achieving an immediate cost saving of $200K.

Further enhancing our cost-efficiency, we switched from Intel to Graviton processors for our core database and analytics operations.

We also upgraded our storage by transitioning from gp2 to gp3 Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes. This helped immensely in achieving cost savings.

Additionally, we also implemented scripts to automatically shut down services when not in use, which led to further savings of $500K.

Results

The benefits realized from this transformation were substantial and wide-ranging.

• Scalability and Growth: Improved scalability of applications led to better user engagement, improved reporting and data analytics
• Cost Savings: Our wide-ranging optimizations resulted in substantial savings, enabling us to reduce costs by 23%.
• Revamped BSS/OSS Systems: The Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) were completely overhauled and new systems were built to support greater scale and agility.
• Product Management Productivity: Revamped OSS/BSS systems allowed us to access previously siloed databases across systems. Faster and detailed access to data and fine-grained reports led to an increase in product management productivity, resulting in significant improvements in time to market.
• Performance Improvement: By transforming key applications like BSS, Billing, CRM, E-commerce, and KYC to a containerized, real-time platform, we were able to better the application performance, reduce processing times and thereby improve customer service and the user experience.
• Reduction in Compute Utilization: Our modernization efforts resulted in a 27% reduction in compute utilization, which directly contributed to further cost savings, highlighting the efficiency gains from the upgraded infrastructure.

These outcomes not only reflect the successful integration of advanced technological solutions but also show a significant return on investment through enhanced efficiency, reduced costs, and improved service delivery across the organization.

This case study not only reflects the technical transformation we achieved but also the collaborative spirit and strategic foresight that drove this monumental and complex project to success.

For more information, write to : sales@sincera.com