TAL hs
Contact:
TAL hs
Rational Software
Kabira Technologies
Iona Software
Tools used:
Kabira ObjectSwitch; Rational Rose; IONA Orbix.
Description:
TAL has been providing commercial GSM wireless service since May 5th 1998. This was a historic day for Icelandic mobile phone users; TAL was the first company to break the monopoly of Iceland Telecom (Landssiminn) in the area of telecommunication. In April 1999 TAL bought Islandia Internet, creating a commercial combination of wireless telecommunications and Internet services. TAL's customers enjoy a rich offering of GSM communications, pre-paid services, SMS , GPRS and Internet access -- a true 2.5G set of wireless offerings.
Problem:
The introduction of next generation mobile networks and services including GPRS has resulted in an order of magnitude increase in complexity at every level of a service provider's network. This complexity extends from the network switching level through the OSS , including mediation and provisioning systems - and BSS , such as mobile commerce, content and billing systems.
At the same time, TAL's business plan calls for rapidly bringing a continuous supply of new services to market. Traditional IT methods of hand coding don't allow for a high level of efficiency for the deployment of news services. Specifically, TAL needed to deploy pre-paid GPRS to its customers in record time. Yet, most of the 3rd party suppliers required a wait of many months and charged for numerous extra licensing charges for new software and equipment.
Solution:
TAL chose the following solutions - (1) Kabira ObjectSwitch , a provider of infrastructure software for revenue-generating convergent services over the Internet, broadband and wireless networks was chosen by TAL to solve the problem of speed to market and cost efficiency to offer its customers high level wireless service. (2) Rational Rose , a leading UML modeling tool was used for development in conjunction with Kabira ObjectSwitch. (3) IONA Orbix was used for industry standard, OMG CORBA interfacing between software and hardware.
Kabira's ObjectSwitch software platform integrates all levels of its network systems and aggregates them into one cohesive system view. This enabled TAL to generate and bill for new applications and services and to introduce the world's first pre-paid GPRS network to access those services. Furthermore, Kabira ensures that TAL has the ability to rapidly accommodate inevitable but presently unknown new services and functionality. ObjectSwitch enables these new services to be created quickly due to high-level UML models. By using standard UML models designed in Rational Rose and the Kabira platform, TAL's IT department was one of the first in the world to bring pre-paid GPRS services to its customers. "UML was chosen for service engine development because it is the most powerful, standard model for the definition of services containing objects, state and event controls," said Dirk Epperson, Kabira's Vice President of Product Strategy.
Kabira's ObjectSwitch software platform also enables next generation service providers to both create and deploy new services while leveraging their investment in current network and services infrastructure. It meets the carrier-grade requirements of performance, scalability and high availability.
"We cannot afford to rely on conventional tools to compete in today's market, particularly with limited engineering resources," said Óskar B. Hauksson, Information Technology Director of TAL. "The Kabira platform allows us to rapidly build, provision and collect revenue for the most innovative GPRS services, enabling us to maximize our engineering productivity and provide our customers with the most compelling services faster than our competitors."
Consumer & Business Benefits:
End customers in Iceland benefit directly from the availability of pre-paid GPRS, pre-paid SMS and reliable, innovative services. All of Iceland benefits from having multiple competitive carriers and the most modern services available in the marketplace.
Financial improvements were largely based upon lower cost-to-deploy and earlier revenue-generation ability. Many months of delays were avoided by using UML and Kabira ObjectSwitch. TAL's IT department and system integrators required far less time than a normal project would require.