The concept of telecommunications has rapidly been redefined by the "tele-my-experience" multimedia convergence. Competitors from within and outside of the traditional telco world are marketing new, integrated service packages to an audience of subscribers, who are more receptive than ever to lower cost offerings and the attractiveness of a one-size-fits-all service provider - a "single-source of integration and service." As a result, telecommunications service providers have had to quickly adapt their legacy infrastructure to provide alternative offerings and new services in an always-available converged network in order to stay competitive. 24/7 availability is the norm for the global-mobile economy. Additionally, the "need it now" service level mandate across an endless number of style-based land and mobile devices has raised the bar for service level agreements to more stringent levels. While the challenges shouldn't be minimized, staying current is an absolute necessity in the rapidly changing, increasingly converged world of telco services. Stay current or get left behind!

The New Norm
Today's converged customer is savvy, educated and discerning - given the current economic climate, coupled with the increasing choice in service providers and breadth of services, modern subscribers want more choice, innovation and on-demand services, all wrapped in increasingly comprehensive, cost-effective and self-serve customizable packages. In order to survive, service providers must be able to support this diversity and availability expectation with the acceleration of broadband-speed services. In addition, they must meet the new demands for location-based and converged voice and data network services.

The (telecommunications) world as we knew it has changed. According to a recent report from The CRTC [1], Canadian-based cable companies have emerged as major competitors providing local and cellular telephone and high-speed Internet services to residential consumers, capturing 17.9% of residential local lines, 40% of cell phone subscribers and 55% of high-speed Internet services in 2007. Amidst consolidation and convergence, the focus is rapidly shifting from technology to services, requiring new technologies and architecture considerations.

Playing to Win
Providers must stay creative, agile and competitive with today's changing subscriber demand, and quick time to market of new services and integration enabled by technology advances is expected. Survivors and winners will be largely differentiated by their ability to stay current, competitive and creative in their offerings, and by how they architect and manage their technology infrastructure to remain responsive. It's no longer enough to offer more capacity and network coverage. Now, quality of service, speed and breadth of new service offerings and providing an integrated, seamless experience of communications, information and entertainment are requirements for playing to win. The customer has changed the game, the products have been redefined and the industry will not wait for the limitations associated with legacy architectures and responsiveness.

In addition to rolling out new services and the convergence of existing products, providers are under additional pressure to keep their billing and provisioning systems up-to-date, requiring upgrades and therefore causing the downtime challenges of planned migrations - and how downtime might affect the subscriber base. And in today's increasingly competitive climate with attractive incentives to switch providers, there is no legitimate time for downtime. The customer doesn't care if downtime is due to system failure or routine maintenance; to them, downtime is downtime. The cost and risk of conversion is no longer what it used to be, and the benefits of an assumed renewable secure customer base is no longer a given. When acquiring a new customer can cost five times that of retaining an existing customer, it makes sense to implement technologies to ensure agility, responsiveness and continuous availability with the goal of a sustained positive user experience [2].

With these architectural requirements, providers must look at availability across all levels including hardware, network, application and database.  As providers seek to build out their infrastructure to support round-the-clock availability for profile changes, program selections, usage and billing inquiries in a subscription self-service framework, all while keeping pace with the changing market, they must view data replication as a critical architectural component. Key questions providers should ask themselves:

• Can the solution support continuous availability during migrations, maintenance and upgrades?
• Can the solution transfer data between heterogeneous sources?
• Are there any distance or cycle time limitations?
• Can the solution meet the recovery time and recovery point objectives of the databases for critical applications such as billing and provisioning?
• Does the solution protect against data corruption issues?

It is increasingly important for today's provider to react to consumer demand in real time and shorten the go-to-market cycle in channels or retail stores. And because they require more complex and distributed server and application environments, next-generation service providers are turning to new solutions that can deliver the necessary levels of scalability and business agility to compete for today's subscribers.

High Availability a High Priority
True operational agility can be achieved by making wise technology choices, such as beginning with a non-intrusive, heterogeneous software solution to meet the availability requirements both during planned and unplanned (in the event of a natural or "manual" system-level disaster) outages. Enabling direct capture of new committed transactions with minimum impact on the source system and delivering that data in real time across one or many heterogeneous systems, regardless of the distance, keeps the target system available and ready for immediate switchover. This minimizes data loss and improves the overall availability and recoverability. In the current economic climate, providers cannot afford to lose a subscriber and will do whatever it takes to keep (or win) one.

Bi-directional data replication can also minimize the risk during system migrations, especially when migrating or consolidating onto new platforms to enable the provision of converged services. Keeping the new system in synch with the old system while it is still active permits application switchover and continuous availability while limiting downtime to literally seconds, even in complex and highly customized environments. This approach also gives providers the option for immediate failover to the old system after switchover if the new system is not quite ready to support users in production.

Real-time heterogeneous data movement also helps to support scalability as the volume of new subscribers continues to grow. Some of the read-only activity such as reporting can be off-loaded to a secondary, lower-cost database that is continuously updated with data from the primary database. Some solutions can also offer bi-directional data replication and enable dual-active database implementations to support load balancing. Both of these implementations can free up the production system for transaction processing and allow greater horizontal scaling.

Information Delivers a Competitive Edge
Companies are facing unprecedented growth in volume of users and the associated data. This growth is driven by offering new products and services across mobile, Internet and cable, as well as expansion into emerging markets. According to the Telecommunications Industry Association, global telecommunications revenue is projected to hit $5 trillion by 2011, with growing demand for high-volume data applications driving both business and consumer markets [3]. In an era when converged services, on-demand service, continuous operations and fast performance are no longer a luxury but a necessity, the market leaders will be those that optimize their infrastructures for continuous application uptime and access to real-time information for ongoing reports and business intelligence.

The core asset within any infrastructure is the need to access, process and utilize information (data) to distinguish your brand from the competition, create a unique customer experience and drive a profitable business. Organizations need to value and utilize it as the "bloodline" of their IT infrastructure. Without the information - does the hardware, software and network really matter? [4]

Resources

1. Communications Monitoring Report, The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), August 4, 2008
   
2. Peppers & Rogers
3. TIA press release; Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) Market Forecasts Target Year 2020; July 9, 2008
   
4. Some segments of this article were developed in collaboration with GoldenGate Software