Bharti Airtel gets future-ready with Oracle

INDIA: To improve business agility and for the digital enablement of its enterprise applications, Indian telecom major Bharti Airtel has recently adopted Oracle solutions to build a standard service-oriented architecture for all its ines of businesses (LOB).

The telecom operator has four key LOBs including mobile, telemedia, B2B, and digital TV serving customers across 20 countries. Each LOB created its own services and integrations- which was causing a lot of complexity and data duplication.

Hence, the company was looking to build a new service-oriented architecture to centralize the integration of over 500 services and 650 operations across the LOBs, and quickly uptake new telecom industry standards. The idea was to gain the ability to reuse the services and backend applications and avoiding duplicates of integration between divisions.

But Bharti Airtel was using legacy point-to-point integration technology, which was very rigid and non-reusable.

The operator was looking to improve the reliability, scalability, and maintainability of enterprise applications, such as CRM and mobile billing system, by providing enterprise-wide monitoring capabilities and making it easy to plug in new applications as business grows.

It was also looking to adopt a common services platform across the enterprise to deliver a single view of customer data, improve time to market, and reduce cost.

To address these challenges, Bharti Airtel adopted Oracle Service Bus and Oracle WebLogic Server to establish a standard service-oriented architecture for all LOBs. It migrated the legacy interfaces to Oracle and went live with the new platform.

The company used Oracle Service Bus to connect heterogeneous applications and reduce integration complexity, enabling itself to reuse services across the enterprise and support new business requirements.

It improved time-to-market by rapidly integrating services and backend applications with a common data model and also improved business agility by enabling easy integration between applications, such as CRM and billing system, and complying swiftly with eTOM Information Framework.

Using Oracle Service Bus’ built-in monitoring capabilities, such as dashboard and service-level agreement alerts, the company was able to secure access to enterprise services and applications based on predefined policies.

One the othe hand, Oracle WebLogic Server helped Airtel to quickly process over 50 million transactions including mobile billing daily without interruption.

The implementations helped to lower operation costs too as Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle WebLogic Server provide complete lifecycle management support for applications across LOBs and simplify maintenance work.

"Implementing Enterprise Service Bus on Oracle Middleware helped us build a scalable and robust integration platform with over 500 services driving the digital enablement of the enterprise applications. With a key focus on governance and industry standards, we reduced integration complexity and enabled reuse, thereby improving time-to-market and ROI," said Ankit Goel, Enterprise SOA Architect, Bharti Airtel Ltd.

The opeartor is currently working to replace the entire integration technology with Oracle.