Deutsche Telekom AG

Story Details

Customer Advantage Program GmbH (CAP) is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG, one of the world's leading telecommunications providers. Recently CAP decided to upgrade its customer retention program, called HappyDigits. However, the upgrade required CAP to overhaul its IT infrastructure to support the newest version of HappyDigits' main application.

What the HappyDigits program does is reward members with cash-value points every time they visit HappyDigits partner sites and make purchases. These points can then be used to make additional purchases. The program is carried out in partnership with KarstadtQuelle, Europe's largest department store chain and mail order group.

To accomplish the upgrade, CAP called on the IT branch of Deutsche Telekom, T-Systems. The project included upgrading CAP's Oracle Siebel CRM software from version 6.3 to version 7.7, converting CAP's database from Oracle 8 to Oracle9i, implementing a newer version of SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, moving from Sun Solaris 8 OS to Sun Solaris 9 OS and integrating customized applications. CAP decided to refresh its hardware platform in parallel with the system upgrade in order to boost performance and support new business growth.

CAP chose Sun based on its past, positive experiences with Sun, as well as on Sun's combination of expertise, technology and price/performance. Powered by four Sun Fire E6900 servers with UltraSPARC IV dual-core processors, CAP was confident that the customer rewards program would be built upon a highly available and scalable hardware solution. CAP deployed several Sun Fire servers as Web servers and as gateway servers that support a KarstadtQuelle cash register system. After running 12,000 tests on the new platform, the two companies migrated the software and hardware over a single weekend, transferring 270 million data records.

With its new Sun platform in place, CAP has a highly available and scalable CRM solution that is providing around-the-clock availability and easily supports the growing transaction volume generated by 24 million HappyDigits members. The scalability allows CAP to handle online transactions in near real-time rather than through the batch processing system it had used before the upgrade. System scalability will allow CAP, as an operator of other rewards programs, to create additional domains. The Sun Solaris 9 OS provides better overall system manageability as well. In combination with Sun's SPARC architecture, the new solution easily supports multithreading operations, which are required for a critical HappyDigits custom application that conducts multiple operations in parallel. The IT overhaul has reduced CAP's operating costs by 30 percent, allowing the investment to be refinanced within 18 months.

Thanks to the stability of the Sun solution, CAP and T-Systems are now focused on expanding the HappyDigits program by delivering greater transaction security and convenience as well as other, more sophisticated features to customers.