Telecommunications – Qwest
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FioranoMQ Answers call from Qwest Communications to help create Scalable Bill Processing System
Customer Profile
Qwest is a leading provider of voice, video and data services across America and the world. For more than a century, homes and businesses have relied on our dependable dial tone connection. We value the strength and vitality we help bring to the communities where we live, work and play-through tens of thousands of volunteer hours donated by employees and retirees, our foundation contributions and numerous other avenues. In communications and community, our goal is to lead.
Business Problem
In the hotly competitive telecommunications industry, providing excellent service isn't enough. You have to continually offer more new services-and bring those services to market faster-than anyone else.
Even the monthly bill, that staple of the phone company relationship, isn't immune. Telcos are expected to process billions of calls each month, then tally them for billing purposes accurately and on time using computing systems subject to ever-tighter budgets. Should the company's customer base increase unexpectedly, processing capacity must follow suit-at minimal additional cost.
Jevons Yu, Lead Software Developer for telecom giant Qwest Communications, understands these requirements well. Yu and his Dublin, Ohio-based team designs and develops the long distance billing systems that service Qwest's 4.4 million business and residential customers.
"Our job is to pull the call records from the switch, apply our automated business logic, then send the data on for actual bill creation," he notes. "When additional demand occurs, we are expected to immediately accommodate that load.
Solution
To accomplish this task, Yu and his associates designed a distributed processing system involving multiple servers that could be pressed into service as needed to provide incremental processing power. It was clear that a Java Messaging Service (JMS) architecture would be the best strategy to couple the disparate elements.
"With JMS we can publish messages that can be used by servers as needed," Yu says. "We can have five servers linked today and add two tomorrow if necessary, without worrying about whether the system can communicate reliably."
A key element of the solution was the selection of a strong software package to create, send, receive and read the Java messages. The Qwest team chose FioranoMQ, the world's fastest and most scalable Java messaging server. Products of business process integration leader Fiorano Software Inc., FioranoMQ implements all of the JMS point-to-point and publish/subscribe APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), together with support for security and massive scalability. The result is a communication platform that allows thousands of concurrent connections to the server as well as remote administration, guaranteed message delivery and easy language translation.
Why Fiorano
"Our system involves a number of applications. Some use C++ while others are Java," Yu states. FioranoMQ provides the native runtime libraries that allow our non-Java applications to talk directly to the server and other JMS clients."
With FioranoMQ, Qwest was able to provide the degree of flexibility it needed for its billing support systems. "Installation was very smooth. Whenever we have had an issue, Fiorano quickly provided the technical support we needed," Yu says. "Since we began using FioranoMQ we've added three Windows NT servers to our original three with no problem. FioranoMQ gives us the interoperability and growth capability we need to take our processing system into the future."
About Fiorano Software
Fiorano Software (www.fiorano.com) is a leading provider of enterprise class business process integration and messaging infrastructure technology. Fiorano's network-centric solutions set a new paradigm in ROI, performance, interoperability and scalability. Global leaders including Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, British Telecom, Credit Agricole Titres, Lockheed Martin, NASA, POSCO, Qwest Communications, Schlumberger and Vodafone among others have used Fiorano technology to deploy their enterprise nervous systems.
To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email us, we will contact you!
