Airtel Gets Consistency With Delivery Platform

With various services under its fold - from the ubiquitous mobile to the rather new IPTV - Bharti Airtel had to find a way to ensure consistency of its services across platforms. Consistency of user experience in an extremely competitive telecom sector was essential.

Highlights

-- Airtel built a service delivery platform (SDP) that provides a framework for the delivery of telecom services.

-- A 'self-care' feature for customers reduced the load on customer service, reducing cost in the process.

To attend to this business need, Airtel built a service delivery platform (SDP) that provides a framework for the delivery of telecom services. The platform is built on SOA principles ensuring interoperability between and across various services. The SDP components are coupled with each other on a bus-based infrastructure and each component is independently scalable. The platform also provides service abstraction for media control and integration for consumer (B2C) and business (B2B) applications.

What it has meant for the business is a paradigm shift in offering value added services (VAS). "Now, application developers can steer clear of the complexities of network and IT systems and focus only on building the business logic," says Dr Jai Menon, director technology and customer service, Bharti Airtel, and group CIO, Bharti Enterprises.

But getting there was tough. Because Menon needed to bring different mediums on a single platform, "The SDP had to integrate distributed multi-vendor network components and existing distributed services had to be migrated to the new platform," says Menon.

With the deployment of the SDP, Airtel has been able to speed up deployment of services (time to market); converge multimedia services across networks and terminals (mobile, broadband, DTH and IPTV); and increase VAS revenue.

A 'self-care' feature for customers reduced the load on customer service, reducing cost in the process. The SDP also provides small developers and content providers with the opportunity to get into the market easily.

The SDP handles 500,000 rich content downloads and over 80 million recharge requests per day. It maintains subscriber records of over 100 million subscribers each having over 50 profile parameters. The Airtel SDP is currently built to cater to 100 million subscribers, and is now being scaled up for 200 million subscribers.