launching a successful online business and ec projects - Prentice Hall

The Problem
The rapid growth of the company, the size of the country
served, the large number of subscribers, and the intense
competition in the mobile telecommunications industry
forced the company to develop a superb communication
system with its customers and business partners. The old
Web presence (static, HTML pages) was inadequate. A
study pointed to a need for an e-commerce-enabled
interactive portal that would care for customers, employees,
and partners. The requirements of this EC application
were many and diversified, since the company
wanted to offer new services that would provide competitive
advantage. The need for more functionalities,
speed, ease of use, etc., became a necessity as well as
the need for quick implementation of any attempted
solution.
The Solution
Since the company’s IT team was unable to build such a project
by themselves in time, the company decided to outsource
the system development. The company contacted three leading
vendors. Discussions with all three companies, proposals
to meet the needs rapidly, integration considerations, reputation
of the vendors and their employees, and more factors
were weighted in the vendor selection process. Furthermore, a
mapping of the system requirements against the vendors’
product offering was also done. The winner was Microsoft.
The solution implemented by the Microsoft team was a
customer-focused, e-commerce-enabled Internet platform that
is flexible enough to grow with the rapid growth of the
company’s business. The platform enables self-care by
customers—they are able to buy services, download content,
and transact with Vodafone on their own. The solution also
integrates seamlessly with the company’s mobile platform and
with hosted services and external service providers—a
strategic direction of corporate’s “Software as a Service”
(SaaS) initiative.
The portal’s back end was based on Microsoft Customer
Care Framework (CCF) 2006, Microsoft Office SharePoint
Server 2007, and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. The middle
tier utilized SQL Server 2008 and Microsoft Connected
Services Framework 3.0. The portal interfaces with
Opening Case
VODAFONE ESSAR OF INDIA
Vodafone Essar is a subsidiary of Vodafone Group Plc., a global mobile telephony company. Vodafone Essar operates in India, and in
September 2009 it had about 83 million subscribers (about 26 percent of India’s total mobile base) and was growing at 25 to
30 percent annually. The company needed an enabled Web platform to provide EC services to customers, employees, and partners.
The project was a very large scale one since it required
robustness, scalability, high availability, flexibility, and security.
Also integration with back-end systems was needed to
facilitate order fulfillment.
The company wanted to revamp its Web site, envisioning
a Web portal that could enhance its Web site and extend
value-added service functionalities on the Web; integrate with
the telecommunication systems to offer content optimized for
mobile phones; and integrate with the B2B extranet and/or
its partners’ Web sites. E-commerce functionality was an integral
and integrated part of this service enablement and
customer-care goals.
There was no detailed justification of the need for the
portal and no quantitative analysis. Competitive and market
forces and the rapid growth were considered qualitatively in
the decision to undertake the project.
Vodafone’s line-of-business applications, which provides for
service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 provides advantages
such as comprehensive content management and enterprise
search, accelerating shared business processes, and it
facilitates information-sharing across the organization’s
boundaries. Commerce Server 2007 enables the creation of
full-featured Web business applications, extension of business
across communication networks, and integration of
e-commerce solutions within the existing IT infrastructure.
CCF is an enterprise software solution for contact and
self-care centers that delivers a unified corporate agent desktop
system that consolidates data from core business systems
such as billing, CRM, and order management applications to
the customer service agent desktop. CCF enables dramatic
improvements in the contact centers’ efficiency by delivering
an improved, consistent customer experience.
The platform promises high availability, security, performance
efficiency, and faster deployment of new services.
Partner management is more efficient; and third-party applications
and services can be acquired and integrated quickly. It
has support for multiple end-user devices, such as desktops,
mobile phones, Xbox, or the Zune.
Implementation took about six months. Given the scale
of the project, it could have taken double that time in other