Open APIs help Airtel Sri Lanka cut OpEx by 80%

Who: Bharti Airtel Sri Lanka

What: Transform 10-year-old legacy IT environment in 6 months

How: Using TM Forum Open APIs, part of the Forum's Open Digital Framework (ODF), to converge systems, collaborate with new partners and develop a business intelligence platform

Results: Retirement of 35 IT applications, 80% reduction in OpEx and 50% reduction in hardware In a recent webinar, Nathan Phipps, Head of Architecture at Bharti Airtel, and Gaurav Darbari, Digital Enterprise Architect, explained how the company completely replaced a 10-year old legacy IT landscape in six months at the Airtel Sri Lanka operating company. A challenger in the Sri Lankan telecommunications market, the mobile operator was still relying on legacy systems deployed in 2008 when the company entered the market.

According to Phipps, the company was in a “sticky situation, sitting on a real time bomb from an IT perspective.” Employees and customers had grown unhappy, and the company had virtually no digital presence. A radical overhaul of the IT environment was required – and it had to happen quickly.

Airtel Sri Lanka’s challenges

Archaic IT – When Bharti Airtel set up shop in Sri Lanka, it basically recreated its Indian IT landscape rather than designing systems customized for the Sri Lankan market. The operations team made separate copies of every application in India and deployed them in Sri Lanka.

This was “overkill,” according to Phipps. The company simply didn’t need so much infrastructure. The IT environment in India needed to support 250 million customers, but the Sri Lankan market included only 5 million prepaid and 120,000 postpaid customers.

Multiple operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) – more than 60 applications running on 77 physical servers – and overall complexity of the platform meant that product or service delivery costs were high. There was no unified customer view and a lot of staff was needed to keep the necessary processes running. In addition, time to market was slow and drawn out, particularly in comparison to other leading operators in the region. Often the IT solutions delivered were obsolete and unnecessary because of how long it took to test and release.

Defunct hardware – By 2018, the hardware installed in 2008 was nearing the end of its life; it was failing considerably, but installing new hardware would have come­­ at a significant (undisclosed) cost.

Loss of developers – A lot of the systems had been heavily customized over the years, but the original developers had long since moved on, making it almost impossible to make any changes at all.

Digitally debilitated – The company’s digital capabilities were minimal to non-existent causing low customer satisfaction ratings.

“The entire thing was sort of stuck in a time machine from the past,” lamented Phipps. “The capabilities were pretty laughable. If you tried to submit an order on the app, for example, it would send an email to someone sitting in the back office who would open the email and then key the order into CRM [customer relationship management] to let it go through.”

Supplier strife – Bharti Airtel’s large, global IT suppliers didn’t have much of a footprint in Sri Lanka. Costs were also at global prices, even though cost base is generally much lower in Sri Lanka. Even the prices to simply “keep the lights on” were prohibitive, resulting in a “kind of a bloody war” as Phipps put it, with the whole support team even walking offsite at one point. In addition, the company’s support contract was scheduled to reset in March 2019 at much higher rates.

Transformation journey

Around the middle of 2018 it became clear something had to change. “We really had our work cut out for us,” explained Phipps. “Coming from the India technology team, we’re used to throwing our weight around and then bossing around suppliers and getting things our way, which really doesn’t work in Sri Lanka at all. So, we had to think of a really creative way to quickly transform this stack, bring in digital capabilities, and do it on a very abbreviated schedule.” The project to transform Airtel Sri Lanka started in mid-September 2018, with March 2019 as the cutoff date for the old technology stack. After a full evaluation, the company decided that instead of going for separate prepaid and postpaid IT stacks, they would deploy a converged IT platform to reduce complexity and OpEx costs. This would also improve efficiency and responsiveness. Airtel capitalized on its long-standing relationship with Comviva, choosing the company’s iPACS solution (Integrated Performance Audit & Compliance Software), which offers converged platform capabilities and a pre-integrated suite. This meant the telco would not need middleware to replace its horde of legacy systems. The graphic below shows Airtel Sri Lanka’s new architecture, and the text that follows highlights the benefits.

Unified CRM platform With such a small customer base, particularly in comparison to India, building a single CRM platform was hugely beneficial in terms of managing both prepaid and postpaid subscribers. The organization was able to use the iPACS platform to do this, replacing an old version of Comviva PACS for prepaid CRM and an Oracle system for postpaid CRM. This enabled Airtel Sri Lanka to join the customer dots to drive a common information model, generate a 360-degree view of the customer, and upsell and cross-sell across the entire customer base.

Chaining OSS and BSS components The iPACS platform helped Airtel break large, monolithic software applications and network functions into smaller, reusable components. Its IT support systems were ‘chained’ together using Open APIs which were included in the iPACS platform. The TM Forum Open APIs chosen were out of the box and not customized in any way so that third-party partners could switch to them with minimal fuss. These APIs also removed the need for pervasive integration, which was previously not well managed and added a lot of complexity to the IT environment.

Additional iPAC uses The converged solution also allowed Airtel Sri Lanka to replace legacy billing , customer care, order management and inventory management systems.

Partnering beyond the converged platform As with Comviva, Airtel already had a relationship in India with Nokia for mediation of call detail records (CDR), so the team used the same technology in Sri Lanka. Airtel also chose Amdocs's eRecharge platform for its Local Area Payment Unit (mobile account recharge/top-up) to replace an assortment of legacy, custom applications. Compliance and regulation were not covered by iPACS, so Airtel used a system from Wipro to provide a portal for its own regulatory teams as well as government agencies to access necessary customer information. The Wipro portal also helps the business track key performance indicators (KPIs) and business performance.

Homegrown business intelligence system Airtel used open source (Cassandra, Kafka, Presto, Spark, Yarn, Zeppelin) to develop its own lightweight business intelligence (BI) platform, rather than using Airtel India’s big data platform, which was unnecessarily big and complex for Airtel Sri Lanka’s needs. The new JIFFY architecture handles real-time events and data profiling.

Successful deployment

The overall results of Airtel Sri Lanka’s digital transformation are impressive: Darbari and Phipps are pleased with the outcome and are looking ahead to how the transformation will position Airtel Sri Lanka to respond quickly to changing markets in the future.

• 35 applications retired
• 50% hardware reduction
• 80% IT OpEx reduction
• On schedule delivery and cutover from legacy
• Existing India engineering team leveraged for development and operations
• New homegrown, lightweight BI platform created using open source platforms
• Complete stack and BI can be easily extensible for other OpCos

“Going forward, [we have] already documented [our future] digital journey, where we [use] new age applications and digital capabilities with the new stack,” Darbari said. Airtel Sri Lanka is essentially “starting from zero” with its digital aspirations, and is beginning with its MyAirtel App which is already prevalent in India, and will be completely self-service, allowing customers to access a one-stop center for all Airtel services such as buying data, voice and SMS bundles and combos, as well as clearing outstanding utility bills, paying for goods and services etc.