Five years ago, Swiss-based Ticinocom – a family business founded in 1996 that has since grown to serve 40,000 global subscribers across broadband, mobile, VoIP IP PBX, and more – was facing a transformational period. The company was looking to overhaul its legacy BSS system, originally developed from scratch in-house on the Windows 2003 platform and Adobe Coldfusion. However, that outdated on-premises solution was deeply complex and difficult to adapt, making it too challenging for Ticinocom to maintain its internal systems and expand its service portfolio, or even to fully identify the backend processes and components that were supporting those services.
CTO Karl Heinz Frankeser knew that the company needed a tailored platform that was simpler to manage, and that would help them modernize both their operations and their product development process. The decision? Ticinocom would use the learnings gained from building and managing that legacy platform to build a new, multi-tenant system – one that was, adaptable, expandable, and ready to be integrated with the flexible and reliable real-time charging engine it was already using to support its VoIP offerings: PortaBilling.
Here’s how Ticinocom made it happen.
Simple, tailored solutions via API
Karl and his team knew that a modular, microservices-based approach would allow Ticinocom to develop and deliver scalable and highly tailored services to hyper-specific regional markets. Foundational to that transformation was the ability to map out and understand their new system, so they could change it at will.
“It was very difficult for us to see what was going on in the backend,” says Karl as he describes his company’s legacy platform. “The old system was built as a monolith, so it was hard for our team to understand what we need to extract, what is useful, what’s not useful, and how we are actually selling VoIP services to our customers.”
Thankfully, Ticinocom’s new modular system creates that previously missing visibility. With the PortaBilling foundation in place, the Ticinocom development team could focus on creating a common API infrastructure to support individual, stand-alone plug-ins for each value-added service (VAS) they want to develop and sell. “We now have microservices for order management, product catalog management, and all the things we need,” explains Karl.
Meanwhile, Ticinocom was also relying on open access to the PortaOne API to keep things simple. “When we ported the PortaOne API implementation from our legacy system to the new one, we were able to embrace the new REST API endpoints for new calls and requests, while at the same time we could migrate the old API calls to the endpoints of the SOAP API without having to change them,” explains Karl. The new, less complex system is also easier to update, further reducing the company’s administrative burden.
And, thanks to those VAS plug-ins, the Ticinocom team can now continually expand and adapt their range of services to meet the changing needs of their customers. In fact, the founders of Ticinocom recently relied on the PortaOne system to launch a new and completely independent service: METAVSHN, a single, united platform that allows businesses to create, manage, and provision products; manage their customer relationships; monitor their billing and data; and launch and design their own customer portal. (If you would like to read about this project from the Ticinocom/METAVSHN perspective, you can visit their blog.)
Experienced support for a successful outcome
There was one more aspect to the Ticinocom and PortaOne partnership that enhanced the results of the entire project: both companies share a deep commitment to client success. This common value allowed PortaOne and Ticinocom to act as true partners – enabling both teams to work together to overcome the technical challenges of company’s old platform and achieve the significant operational improvements that came out of this transformation.
“Partnering with PortaOne is one of the luckiest things we have done as a company, because out of all of the services we sell, PortaOne has been the most stable, the easiest to work with, and the most reliable software partner,” says Karl. “The quality of support is very high, because you’re talking with people who know what they’re doing.”
By replacing an outdated, inflexible legacy system with custom, unified API infrastructure built around a PortaOne foundation, Ticinocom is now able to grow its customer base as fast as it needs to. Even better, those plug-in capabilities mean that Ticinicom can now customize its services to match the specific needs of each customer, precisely meeting their unique preferences now and into the future.
Achieve growth and flexibility with PortaOne
Are you ready to elevate your telecommunications infrastructure with tailored solutions that can help you deliver the right products to the right market? Join industry leaders like Ticinocom that have leveraged our seamless integrations and open API philosophy to revolutionize their services. Our expert team can help you improve your operations so you can enjoy enhanced scalability, flexibility, and control.
Transformations like Ticinocom’s require trusted, accessible support and constant two-way communication – that’s what allows our team to ensure your systems are robust and future-proof. Reach out today to see how we can help drive your business forward, improve your customer experience, and secure a customized, cost-effective edge in a competitive telecom landscape.
