There was a bit of M&A in the competitive telecommunications market in the MidAtlantic. The managed service provider Xtel Communications has announced the acquisition of Global Telecom, a.k.a. GTB, extending its geographical reach and adding to its talent pool. … [visit site to read more]
A sudden pandemic disrupted all sectors of the economy in 2020, with countries taking various lockdown measures. For an international company like Whale Cloud, it became an unprecedented challenge to deliver global projects – especially digital transformation projects – on time.
In this interview, Dora Xu, Executive Vice President of Whale Cloud International who oversees Global Delivery and Operations, explains how to ensure the stable operation of global customers’ systems under the impact of the pandemic, how to achieve on-time delivery of large-scale projects, and shares the best practices of « Global Digital Transformation Delivery During the Epidemic » and the new delivery approach in the post-pandemic era.
In large-scale software delivery projects, remote delivery is more challenging. It involves not only the difference in communication and understanding of requirements between the two parties, but also how to leverage effective project management methods to encourage all departments of CSPs and external partners to fully participate in the whole project, and match our delivery pace. Digital transformation projects are more special as they often need business process renovation and business model innovation, and multiple departments in the organization are involved, rather than traditional IT department-dominated way. At the same time, overseas projects will also encounter differences and challenges such as regulations, time zones, language, and culture.
Before the pandemic, Whale Cloud already had a deep understanding and exploration of remote delivery, and the new situation was a catalyst in accelerating the implementation of its new delivery model. To maximize the value of remote delivery, we needed to conduct adjustments and shifts in organizational structure, methodology and process, technology and tools.
A large-scale project involves hundreds of people. Take U Mobile as an example: a project we completed in 2022 which involved about 500 people distributed across 9 cities in 6 different countries. The reasonable allocation of the Agile Release Train (ART) team and Scrum team needs to be considered horizontally and vertically in terms of geography, job types, and work tasks. It is also necessary to adjust the organizational structure in real-time at different stages according to the duration of the project.
The alignment of goals and paces between the ART team and the Scrum team can achieve synchronization despite time zone and geographical differences. This involves alignment at different dimensions, including strategic goals, management plans, business requirements, and technical solutions. For the strategic and management alignment, we adopt the latest « large-scale lean-agile » concept and conduct Steering Committee (SteerCo), Executive Committee (EC) and daily stand-up meetings. At the technical/business level, we use the Lean Kanban mechanism for alignment, and Separation of Concerns (SoC) – that is, « research and develop on rhythm, release on demand » – to enable different teams in different time zones to work at their own pace without waiting for each other.
In terms of technology and tools, the cloud-native technology isolates the environmental differences between different locations, makes one-click deployment and one-click upgrade possible, and simplifies the difficulty of remote troubleshooting. The ZCM DevOps platform developed by Whale Cloud realizes the Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) of the business value stream. With the cloud delivery platform (eDo), the task flows are transparent between different teams. The delivery process and problems can be visualized through dashboards so that all project members can see it at a glance. Information and risks are scattered due to multi-faceted and off-site remote delivery; visualization management is an essential means to solve these issues. Remote delivery can be implemented more efficiently, safely and economically through this combination.
The organizational division between ART and Scrum, the adoption of the SoC approach (research and develop on rhythm, release on demand), and CI/CD aim to achieve agile delivery of business value streams. To ensure the reliability of migration from a legacy system to a new system and eliminate the risk, we leveraged an innovative migration approach called Bridging, which enabled online migration and allowed legacy and new platforms to run in parallel, realizing agile and stable migration.
We have successfully delivered many projects with the remote delivery approach, including DITO Telecommunity in the Philippines, WOM in Chile, SilkNet in Georgia, MTN in Rwanda and WOM in Colombia. The BSS Transformation of U Mobile impressed me the most as it is the best practice for both remote delivery and smooth migration. We have mitigated the risk and improved maturity in business operations for U Mobile without impact on customer experience. It has also recently won the Project Excellence Awards from Project Management Institute (PMI) China.
The BSS Transformation of U Mobile is a large-scale project with nearly 500 team members, including Whale Cloud’s R&D and delivery team, U Mobile’s IT and business departments, and 70+ partners. In the early phases of the project, Whale Cloud and U Mobile consultants worked together to define and optimize the business model & processes, formulating the goals and correct paths to realize the transformation. Although the pandemic affected the delivery phase as we could not work with U Mobile on-site, we achieved the goals by introducing a large-scale lean-agile approach and conducting a combination of Program Increment (PI) and Sprint.
Over the years, we have accumulated extensive experience in large-scale projects, and refined a set of delivery concepts, or methodologies applicable to large-scale software projects by reinventing our organization, processes, and tools – this is what we call Digital Transformation Delivery Framework (DTDF). It is divided into four layers.
The delivery strategy layer is the stage of aligning the delivery strategy and digital transformation goals, or we can say decomposition and refinement from CSPs’ digital transformation goals to the delivery strategy. We work with CSPs to identify « value-first » transformation requirements, and then make the delivery strategy, scope, KPIs and acceptance criteria.
The delivery tactics layer is to complete the tactical delivery arrangements such as project plan, organizational formation, and management process of delivery strategy objectives. It aims to reach an agreement on the tactical arrangement of project delivery methods.
The delivery execution layer is the process of project execution and value delivery. With the agile and stable delivery approach, each team can achieve rapid value delivery by completing the pre-set strategic objectives and adjusting measures to local conditions.
The fourth layer is the continuous evaluation process. Continuous iteration, metrics measurement, adjustment and optimization for the stage delivery results help set delivery strategies and goals for the next stage of transformation.
This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Boominathan Shanmugam of Prodapt Systems
Most service providers in the connectedness industry are challenged with the planning and allocation of field technicians based on demand. Gartner states, “Balancing available resources against the demand is essential to successful initiative completion.” Based on the engagements with various service providers, the common challenges in traditional field service capacity planning are … [visit site to read more]
Voice communications can be complicated–especially as organizations and people become more distributed. In 2023, companies will need to be able to keep their voice communications flexible, and that means having complete control over DIDs and SIP connections. Bicom Systems and Telnyx have partnered to empower MSPs and resellers to effectively manage their telephony systems, without having to wait on support agents and tickets.
When number porting and connection set-up is in the hands of onboarding agents and support staff, it can often leave you in the dark. If something goes wrong–how do you know? What systems do you have access to that can help you understand the root of the issue, or give you an estimate of updated cutover dates?
At Telnyx we believe you should have visibility into something as important as migration and connection creation. We have added a number of helpful products and features to give you complete control over your telephony–via our intuitive UI or next-gen APIs.
When you partner with an experienced provider like Bicom Systems, they do all the heavy lifting for you. Providers are equipped with teams of expert engineers ready to prevent and solve issues as they arise or before they occur. That way, resellers and MSPs can focus on what they do best: selling.
FastPort was developed to help customers adequately plan and execute port-ins and the often-complex porting process. In just a few clicks, users can check customer service record (CSR) validation, schedule cutover times, make edits to requests and track port status.
FastPort helps take the stress out of porting by giving you complete transparency at each stage of the process through the Mission Control Portal or via API.
Over the past 3 years, we’ve seen that demand on voice services can change in an instant, and organizations need to be able to respond to that shift in record time. Unlike traditional telephony providers, Bicom Systems and Telnyx don’t limit the number of channels and connections. This facilitates easier scalability rather than being dependent on legacy systems and infrastructure.
We enable businesses to scale voice capacity on demand in the Mission Control Portal. Our multi-cloud, global infrastructure–combined with our deep number inventory–gives customers the flexibility required to manage a next-gen system of communications.
Voice prioritization at Bicom Systems starts when you build your virtual foundation. SERVERware is the only virtualization platform tailored to hosting telephony and unified communications in the cloud. The platform is dedicated to prioritizing voice and is 100% scalable to fit the needs of any business.
Waiting hours to be connected to support just to give basic call information and open a ticket should be a thing of the past. It creates both operational inefficiencies and poor customer satisfaction as the end user waits for answers to issues that can have a big impact on their business.
Telnyx has developed a suite of debugging tools that live in the Mission Control Portal to help our users get from issue → resolution, faster. They include:
As a carrier, Telnyx can help Bicom Systems customers self-serve on issues–across porting, connection set-up and call quality–for improved time to resolution, decreased downtime and an elevated customer experience.
On top of the debugging tools that live in the Telnyx Mission Control Portal, Bicom Systems has a toolbox of its own:
Gain access to markets all across the world with Bicom Systems and Telnyx. Through our partnership, we are making it easier for businesses to scale their communications globally with our suite of self-service tooling for number search and provisioning, SIP trunking creation and management, debugging, and QoS reporting. Telnyx offers Bicom Systems customers PSTN Replacement in over 31 countries around the world, including key markets such as the US, Australia, the UK, and the Netherlands.
To learn more about the Bicom Systems and Telnyx partnership and how we can help you expand your global offering, reach out to a member of our team today!
From around the world this morning and late last week: a couple of interesting executive moves over in Europe, a rebranding, a new data center campus, and a network upgrade project. … [visit site to read more]
The Brazilian government has qualified 12 companies to operate the second section of Norte Conectado, an Amazon River fibre backbone project, as a consortium.
The 12 companies selected were Telefônica, TIM, Claro, Aquamar, ClickIP/ICOM Telecom, SEA Telecom, BR Fibra, Mobwire/DB3, Ozônio Telecom, PPLINK, VOCE Telecom and V.tal. These companies will be able to operate, maintain and commercially use the optical backbone section for a 15-year period, which can be renewed.
According to news service BNamericas, the project, known as Infovia 01, will involve the installation of about 1,100 kilometres of a sub-fluvial fibre cable that will connect the city of Santarém, in the state of Pará, and Manaus, in the state of Amazonas, through fibre laid along the Amazon River. There will also be a number of branches to other towns.
This initiative is part of the second section of the eight that make up the Norte Conectado programme, which seeks to expand the communications infrastructure in the Amazon region of Brazil through an underwater fibre trunk network. This network is said to have a low environmental impact as it uses river beds to reach the population and does not require deforestation.
Infovia 01 adds to the 770km first section, Infovia 00, plans for which we reported in January. Six companies have signed up to form the consortium to use and operate the first section.
Infovia 01 is being deployed and should be completely rolled out by the end of January, according to the government. The infrastructure should be available for use by March.
BNamericas reports that Chinese fibre optics manufacturer Hengtong will be the cable supplier for Infovia 01.
The judicial process involving the recovery plan of Brazilian service provider Oi seems to be over – after more than six years of negotiations with creditors.
Judge Fernando Viana of the 7th Business Court of Rio de Janeiro has now decreed that all obligations assumed by the company have been fulfilled. His decision noted that the judicial recovery plan was the largest in the country’s history and one of the most complex cases in the contemporary legal world.
Brazilian press reports say that as a result of the merger between Oi and Brasil Telecom, Oi filed for judicial recovery in the Rio de Janeiro Court in June 2016. At the time, the company owed BRL 65.4 billion (about US$12.3 billion but possibly closer to US$19 billion at today’s rates) and renegotiations with creditors to restructure the debts had failed. It was the largest bankruptcy request in the country’s history. The gross debt is now about a third of that amount.
In December 2017, creditors approved the judicial recovery plan, which reduced liabilities by 40% through the conversion of debts into equity interest in the company. The sale of Oi’s assets – mobile operations, a submarine cable company, a fibre optic company and around 8,000 fixed telephone towers – followed a few years later. There was also a debt reduction agreement with the Attorney General’s Office.
But the story isn’t quite over yet. The company still has around 22 billion reais (US$4.2 billion) of debts, and Oi, with limited cash-generating assets, will probably be loss-making for a while yet.
In addition unpaid creditors will still be able to continue to make claims. Oi faced claims from some 65,000 creditors, and not all cases have been settled to date. However, according to TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, the judge noted that “it is not the objective of the judicial recovery process to check whether the debtor will fulfil all the obligations contracted in the plan”.
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As 2022 comes to a close, Zayo released some details on where it has been investing in its network. The list gives us a sense of not just 2022, but where the company is headed as we move into 2023. … [visit site to read more]
This Industry Viewpoint was authored by Kailem Anderson – Vice President of Portfolio and Engineering for Blue Planet, a division of Ciena
Network engineers and architects commonly used diagrams to visualize their network architecture. However, with the advent of disaggregated networks, 5G, and edge computing, which are designed to deliver dynamic services comprised of virtualized resources that can be placed anywhere in the network, generating an accurate picture of the ever-changing network has become more challenging than ever. … [visit site to read more]
