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GO

Future-proof BSS architecture for quad-play services

GO is the largest communications and entertainment provider in Malta with well over 480,000 customer connections.

GO has been providing telecom services in Malta for more than 35 years, originally as the fixed line incumbent, then introducing the first nationwide dial-up services in the early 1990’s and subsequently adding broadband in 2000. The mobile arm of the group was set up in 1999, with the most recent addition being TV in 2007, making GO the first and only quad-play provider in Malta.

GO (then known as Maltacom) originally selected Cerillion to support its fixed line services back in 2001. Since then, GO has restructured its business to become a fully integrated quad-play operator and set out on a programme to consolidate its IT platforms in order to improve its commercial offerings, accelerate time-to-market and increase its operational flexibility.

With Cerillion as our 4P platform we have realised a significant time to market advantage, reducing the time to design and launch new products from months into weeks and days.
Ramana Palepu
CIO, GO Malta

The Challenges

As the leading provider of communications and entertainment services on the Maltese Islands, GO has always prided itself on innovation. With telecoms technologies evolving so quickly, GO recognised the need to create a future-proof Business Support Systems (BSS) architecture that will support changes in business strategy and enable GO to take advantage of multiple future technology streams.

This has resulted in a number of key requirements for GO’s BSS platforms:

  • Support a fully convergent quad-play (fixed, mobile, internet, TV) service portfolio
  • Enable flexible bundling and unbundling of services to compete with single-service and multi-service offerings of competitors
  • Reduce time-to-market to significantly less than one month
  • Rationalise the number of systems and increase operational efficiencies
  • Support a best-of-breed architecture with clearly defined APIs and supporting a Service Oriented Architecture

The Results

Following a very smooth and successful upgrade to Cerillion 5 in 2009, GO settled on its BSS strategy with Cerillion chosen as the best-of-breed component for Billing its quad-play services. In the meantime, GO has also upgraded to the latest Interconnect Manager version for managing all its interconnect agreements. With fixed, TV and broadband services already well established on the Cerillion system, GO completed the migration of its mobile services onto the same platform during 2010. This has enabled GO to retire its legacy mobile billing system and reap the benefits of having a unified product catalogue and being able to bill for all quad-play (4P) services on a single, convergent Cerillion platform. “With Cerillion as our 4P platform we have realised a significant time to market advantage, reducing the time to design and launch new products from months into weeks and days,” comments Ramana Palepu, CIO, GO. “We have also benefited from a dramatic cost reduction when implementing new or changed products, the result of easy configurability of new plans, offers and bundles.” The latest evolution has been GO’s transition to using Cerillion’s Order Management module, enabling an “all-products, all channels” capability native to the billing system: “Working with Cerillion our users have benefited from a reduction in back-office work through improved integration and straight-through processing of various transactions. Reduction in the number of different systems they have to use in delivering a service has meant lower complexity, improved accuracy and reduced end-to-end time taken.” “Furthermore, the reliability and quality of the integrated OSS/BSS platform serving “all products, all channels” has given us increased operations efficiency, which translates into the ability to redirect those savings to deliver more in other areas, especially new commercial initiatives and projects, achieving greater IT-Commercial alignment.“ A close working partnership with its strategic partners is crucial to GO’s future plans. As Ramana Palepu summarises: “An excellent, trusted, collaborative and consultative relationship with companies such as Cerillion is a key enabler of our success. A good product/platform is one thing, but a superior organisation and an execution and support infrastructure is another. One, to the exclusion of the other, is unlikely to succeed. Cerillion gave us both.”

 

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