Background

The earlier BSS 3.0 pilot achieved initial results. To further raise perception among China Telecom Group customers and the front line and to strengthen IT enablement, China Telecom Group decided to start BSS 3.0 rollout, with 12 provinces in the first wave.

China Telecom Group is actively advancing IT to the cloud with new-generation BSS 3.0 as the entry point, creating a best practice for moving a large, extremely complex business-support system to the cloud, and supporting China Telecom’s “enterprise to the cloud” strategy. New-generation BSS 3.0 is first developed on distributed PaaS platform components independently developed by China Telecom Group, and is the first telecom business operations-support system to put core IT capabilities on the cloud. Full application of BSS 3.0 will, with big-data intelligence, empower customer operations, channel management, and front-line and customer-experience improvement. The new “platform + application” architecture brings not only technical change but, more importantly, a substantial rise in market-operations efficiency and a breakthrough of business-development bottlenecks.

Requirements

The 12 provinces in the first wave—Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shanxi, Chongqing, Xinjiang, Yunnan, Gansu, Ningxia, Hainan, Hebei, Jiangxi, and Shanxi—plan to move mainly billing and CRM to the cloud, specifically including the recharge center, accounting center, customer center, acceptance center, and other businesses.

Solution

The infrastructure (IaaS) layer uses Sugon high-end two-socket I620-G20 servers. The highly available servers are used together with China Telecom Cloud Company’s Tianyi Cloud. The platform (PaaS) layer is unified across the network. Core components use the latest R&D results of the Telecom Research Center, with a nationwide unified version and unified operations management. The I620-G20 is configured with multiple NVMe PCIe SSDs and multiple 10-Gigabit NICs. High I/O throughput keeps business running smoothly, and each physical node meets NUMA-balanced settings to maximize whole-system performance.

Overall Solution Advantages

Higher business efficiency: time to market for bundled packages shortened by 50%, product count reduced by 40%, sales-item count reduced by 55%, acceptance clicks reduced by 30%, ticket rating efficiency raised 6 times, itemized-bill query efficiency raised 1.5 times, and billing-reminder time shortened.

Higher build-and-maintain efficiency: resources are jointly built and shared, and application systems securely reuse platform resources.

Lower cost: unified components lower cost, unified operations reduce provincial operations staff, and investment is saved.