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Industry: Telecommunications
Product(s): BEA WebLogic® Enterprise Platform (BEA WebLogic Server®, BEA WebLogic® Integration, BEA WebLogic Portal®)
Business Problem: Complex business process management across the extended enterprise.
Project: Integration platform: WebLogic Integration provides a complete solution to meet BT Wholesale's integration requirements.
Why BEA: "Flexibility, performance and the ability to integrate legacy applications into a multi-tier architecture."
Highlights: Enables BT Wholesale to reach new customers and increase demand chain and supply chain visibility. "BEA will enable us to accelerate time-to-market."
BT is one of the world's leading providers of telecommunications services and one of the largest private sector companies in Europe. BT Wholesale, a business division within BT, provides comprehensive telecommunications network services to more than 400 communications providers and operators. Founded in 1982, BT Wholesale employs over 30,000 people in the UK to manage its massive networks and exchanges. These services enable international operators and large corporations to seamlessly access the UK network. To deliver these services, BT Wholesale leverages partners such as Nortel, Telsis, Cisco Systems, and Unisys to provide IP, voice, data networking, e-business, and mobile solutions.
To meet aggressive revenue projections and cost reduction pressures, the company needed to significantly change its business processes and simplify its enterprise IT architecture. Its architecture includes billing, workforce management, and customer relationship management systems such as Clarify, Siebel, and other packaged, legacy and custom applications. Current business processes, spanning over 22 systems with an excess of manual interactions, have become costly and difficult to maintain. Cost, and the inability to scale to meet new demands, limited BT Wholesale's ability to respond to existing customers and to expand into new markets. Integrated and streamlined business processes were therefore critical to BT Wholesale's continued growth and success.
To reduce IT complexity and improve extended enterprise processes, BT Wholesale made it a high priority to implement a business-to-business (B2B) gateway and further internal enterprise integration. "We see the B2B gateway as being a key component in BT Wholesale's systems solution going forward and a key factor in its future success and prosperity," said Sean O'Donovan, solutions architect with BT Exact Technologies, which is co-developing the solution for BT Wholesale.
The B2B gateway currently enables BT Wholesale customers to submit purchase orders and repair requests online and in an automated fashion. This automation guarantees faster communication, shorter cycle times, and more efficient order processing, ultimately reducing BT Wholesale's reliance on its call center. The company projects that it will ultimately save in the order of £2.77m alone over 3.5 years with its B2B gateway, simply from reducing the development effort by using components available within WebLogic Integration.
"With BEA's help, we plan to solve a number of integration problems," said Steve Barnes, manager of Integration Technology Infrastructure at BT. "These include improving and enhancing legacy integration, integrating Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications (and others), and providing a consistent, scalable, open and manageable platform for delivering e-business applications."
"We chose BEA after extensive evaluation against competing solutions," said Barnes. "We needed flexibility, performance and the ability to integrate legacy applications into a multi-tier architecture. It was clear that BEA had a product strategy that was directly aligned with our own requirements for high scalability and availability. BEA will enable us to accelerate time-to-market by moving to component-based development for new applications - BEA will provide us with the 'glue' to make this happen."