New Service Offering

The MENA telecom operator has always been focused on offering the foremost technology in communications. Maintaining its position as a market leader means that the company has to introduce new services and adapt its service provisioning to suit the changing needs of its customers.

To complement its wide array of voice and digital services, the telecom company decided to extend its B2B offering with Cloud Services. This would enable it to provide businesses with a complete set of cloud-powered services, while staying ahead of the competition.

Cloud Services Platform

iQuest committed to building a scalable eCommerce portal website, that allows the operator to sell cloud-based services, ranging from email & web hosting to virtual servers and collaboration tools, to its business customers.

Based on the hybris commerce platform, the portal website features three main components: Customer Cloud Storefront, Self Service Portal and a Business Administration Portal. By addressing the needs of both customers and internal business users, it offers a great deal of service flexibility.

iQuest developed and implemented the two client-facing components of the website as well as the business administration part, focusing on the automation of the entire workflow.

Our client is a leading mobile carrier in MENA. It provides services to both individuals and enterprises and has a customer base of more than 36 million customers.

Customer Cloud Storefront The focal point of customer interaction with the cloud solution is a web-enabled storefront used for acquisition purposes. The commerce platform benefits from a wide range of features, such as promotions, discounts, personalisation and CMS, enabling customers to browse, research, register and purchase IaaS and SaaS cloud subscriptions.

Customer Self Service Portal Through a Single Sign On platform, authenticated and authorised users can access an administration panel allowing them to view their current service subscription, manage permissions, upgrade and renew subscriptions, and add subscription add-ons. The portal supports commerce features that allow cross-sells, up-sells and notifications, upholding a healthy business growth.

Business Administration Portal At the business process level, the B2B portal enables the company’s business users to administer the products and subscriptions sold through the storefront. The tool empowers non-technical internal members to define product features, prices, create special offers, and manage the storefront catalogue without any development effort from the IT department, reducing the system’s maintenance cost.

Solution integration and orchestration The full automation of the purchase and provisioning process entailed providing advanced integration and orchestration of the 23 systems - part of the overall solution, such as billing, CRM, POS, FraudCheck, Siebel, TIBCO and dotmasr, within a unified commerce platform.

As part of the solution, a generic product implementation extension was designed to enable the mobile carrier to sell and add new software in the cloud with no intervention from the vendor and no additional maintenance and support. The cloud portal is based on the hybris 4.8 platform and it is deployed on Oracle WebLogic server. The portal solution was internationalised to support strong multi-language personalisation and layout for English and Arabic.

Optimised Business Flexibility

The Cloud Solution is offered as a service to the telecom operator’s customers and software vendors in order to address the need for data availability and service mobility. By implementing the hybris-based cloud solution, the iQuest team laid down a solid foundation for the full automation of the company’s cloud portal infrastructure.

Both the Cloud Storefront and the Self Service Portal enable customer-driven product subscriptions that ultimately boost direct sales, improve online conversion rates and multiply user registration.

By integrating services, such as WebHosting or Exchange, the portal solution enables end users to benefit from self-managing subscriptions, advancing to a higher level of reliability. This setup has prompted an increase in customer retention and low maintenance costs, as manual intervention is employed only on request. Being able to commercialise multiple B2B software services with no vendor intervention offers great flexibility to the company’s clients, as well significantly contributing to attracting new customer segments.

The Business Administration Portal provides the telecom operator’s internal users with content management capabilities to administer and maintain the customer storefront, which causes reduced response time to market changes, contributing to the expansion of the mobile carrier’s current market and products.

This is the first enterprise implementation of a fully automated Cloud SaaS/IaaS solution hosted within MENA. The Cloud platform enables our client to sustain its position as a market leader for delivering innovative solutions that help SME and SoHo to grow their businesses with a minimum budget and effort. With the automation of business-critical workflows, our client has gained a stronger strategic position on the Telco marketplace, successfully evolving from selling communication services to providing business transformation.

About iQuest iQuest is an international IT services group that for more than 15 years has been delivering an extensive portfolio of customised software solutions, products and integration services across Europe, MEA and the US. With a successful combination of technical expertise and service excellence, iQuest drives long-term business value for leading companies in Life Sciences, Telecom, Financial Services, Transportation and Energy. Headquartered in Germany, iQuest has local teams in Switzerland, Romania and the US, and currently employs more than 500 people. For more information, please visit: www.iquestgroup.com © Copyright 2014, iQuest Technologies. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission from iQuest. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.