Telecommunications Company #3

The Client

This multi-state telecommunications provider has nearly seven million local, wireless, DSL, and long-distance accounts. The company provides private, business, and government customers with voice, internet, data and video services.

With nearly 40,000 employees servicing about one-third of the United States, reliable and secure information technology services are required to support on-going daily operations and billing systems, as well as both online eCommerce and eBusiness solutions. The company maintains a technically advanced network capable of transferring voice, video, and data across the globe for businesses of all sizes, with services such as Voice over IP (VoIP), as well as high bandwidth applications such as ERM and CRM.

The Engagement

The client had an existing B2C portal which allowed consumers access to their accounts to add, delete and pay for services. During the course of adding functionality to the portal, two significant performance issues materialized that needed immediate resolution.

Critical Services Delivered

Working closely with an IBM Service team, Encode supported the analysis, design and development of functional enhancements to the client's existing portal, as well as resolving the "critical" situations.

In the first instance, the entire credit card validation system became inoperative, preventing new customers the ability to register and make purchases. Tracing the system through its "specialized rules code" down to the EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) level, Encode was able to determine that the third-party credit card service had failed to update a sub-system. Once this was corrected the problem was rectified.

In the second instance, the LDAP unexpectedly became inoperable causing a major customer impact. Encode provided a "work-around" bringing the system to a functioning level until we were able to replace whole sections of poorly developed code.

• Business Needs Analysis
• Design and Development
• Problem Determination/Resolution
• "Best Practices" Mentoring

Technology Used

• IBM WebSphere Portal and associated products
• IBM DB2
• IBM AIX
• LDAP
• SAP