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In 2008, the Netherland’s third largest provider of fixed-telephony services, Pretium Telecom, wanted to simplify its service-oriented architecture (SOA), to speed up the development of a new VoIP offering and to minimize costs. With the solution Pretium Telecom used at that moment, only 20%–30% of that solution’s capabilities was used. The unused components slowed performance, inflated hardware requirements, and added complexity to the user experience. Not only did this drive up the total cost of ownership, but the existing SOA’s proprietary business-process-execution-language (BPEL) engine also limited interoperability, restricted choice, and impeded change. In addition, the new VoIP and broadband offering required additional hardware, which would significantly increase licensing costs. Another challenge was that all new business partners participating in the service chain — providing services such as modem delivery or home support — needed to run the proprietary BPEL Process Manager to interact with Pretium Telecom’s SOA, adding another requirement and expense.

Pretium Telecom contacted its IT vendor Yenlo, a company that specializes in SOAs built with open-source technologies, to discuss alternatives. After evaluating possible solutions from Sun, Apache, and JBoss, Pretium Telecom and Yenlo concluded that replacing the current SOA Suite with Sun GlassFish ESB and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server could provide the required functionality in a smaller, more agile, open-standards–based framework. In addition, the GlassFish ESB and Enterprise Server products offer a variety of support options from Sun, and having support services was crucial to Pretium Telecom. What finalized the company’s decision to choose the Sun solution was the proof of concept. In less than two weeks, Yenlo was able to rebuild the company’s entire stack.

One month later, 8 - 10 employees from Pretium Telecom and Yenlo began to work on the SOA which would initially support only the new VoIP and broadband services, and later it will replace the complete Oracle SOA offering. The team used the built-in BPEL engine in the GlassFish ESB to design an ordering system that includes 10 fully automated business processes to support tasks such as account setup, customer relationship management, invoicing, direct withdrawal from bank accounts, and marketing campaigns. In addition, the team took only one day to set up the new highly available production environment with four clusters that use in-memory replication and the SUSE 10.x operating system. To develop new applications, including a call-center program that runs on the GlassFish Enterprise Server, the team used the NetBeans IDE and Spring Framework. Developers also used built-in adapters in the GlassFish ESB and components of Metro Web Services — including JAX-WS, JAXB, WSIT, and XWS-Security — to create secure, XML-based Web services that can exchange information between Pretium Telecom’s systems, including an Oracle database, and six partner systems, some of which use Microsoft .NET.

Commenting on the new SOA, Ruud de Greef, chief information officer at Pretium Telecom says, “We are very excited about our new GlassFish ESB solution. It provides a combination of open-source development tools, which makes it possible for us to quickly adapt to changes and increase profits. And the development environment’s ease of use is remarkable. Our developers’ productivity has increased about 40%–50%.” Two notable differences between the Oracle and Sun solutions are the ease of clustering servers and establishing security. “Previously, it costed a lot of money to license clustered enterprise services, and setting up clusters was very difficult,” explains Joost Hofman, senior system engineer at Yenlo. “Today, we can cluster services in less than ten minutes.” Adding security to applications and services also takes seconds. “This is a huge leap from the previous architecture,” adds Hofman. Rapid resolution through the open-source community and Sun support services also boosts efficiency. “Sun provides very professional support services, and we have easy access to the engineers who can quickly answer our questions,” says de Greef.

Hardware costs are much lower than predicted, and throughput has increased. “The configuration of the GlassFish ESB is more efficient because we don’t have components that we don’t use,” de Greef notes. “This means we need less memory and less storage.” As a result, the new SOA costs approximately 50% less than the previous one.

In March 2009, Pretium Telecom launched its new SOA — which is protected by Sun Silver Support — three months earlier than projected. End users can access the SOA through a single Web-based application. Although the migration from the Oracle SOA Suite to the GlassFish technologies is still in progress, Pretium Telecom will completely replace the Oracle SOA Suite by October, 2009.

Initially, the new SOA is expected to support approximately 5,000 new customers each month. In general a relationship with a customer will last for many years. On a daily base customers do create high numbers of transactions. Pretium Telecom expects the new architecture to support at least 175,000 transactions a day in October 2009, once the replacement of the Oracle SOA stack is complete.

 
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