Overview

pAs one of America’s top carriers, T-Mobile US, Inc. is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and service innovation. The company's advanced nationwide 4G LTE network delivers outstanding wireless experiences to more than 72.6 million customers who are unwilling to compromise on quality and value./p

Supernova Award Category

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Problem

pAfter the implementation of the Un-carrier marketing campaign, T-Mobile saw a significant increase in their subscriber base. At the time, they had almost 73 million subscribers. With their monolithic architecture, they had to add hardware for every Un-carrier move. They had large sets of services running as single blocks. During promotions, the most crucial information is customer usage, but it was in one functional block—and they had physical architecture that could only scale up, not down. "We needed to break down the monolithic single block into microservice architecture so the core business could expose specific functions. We had six months to procure the hardware and set up all the systems to enable the volume we wanted to sustain.” -Rakesh Madireddy, Principal Engineer/p

The Solution

pAs a previous customer, T-Mobile had the connection and faith in TIBCO to meet the drastically increasing demands of the market. They decided that a hybrid platform would be their design goal. With TIBCO’s engineering and support, T-Mobile was able to design and implement that hybrid platform. “We can now easily service customers, and during promotions get usage and leave the user info as is. To accomplish that, we needed a continuous deployment model where we can quickly push to production, test right there with blue and green deployment, and then push live.”  -Rakesh Madireddy, Principal Engineer/p

The results

pTIBCO containerization helped T-Mobile deliver more experience-driven APIs. T-Mobile has APIs for individual channels, for Twitter, Facebook, and various websites and mobile channels. Now they can quickly deliver these and reach the customer faster. They can also send targeted messages through SMS, email, or a phone call based on user preferences and location, and get feedback from users. T-Mobile can also do targeted promotions using a containerized SMS, API, or email API. "We listen to customers, and then we deliver, so we need APIs, and that's how containerization helps us, from marketing to IT operations. Promotions are more stable and faster. For the recent iPhone launch, we sustained increased volume of almost 10-fold during pre-order. Out of the box, we quickly enabled the auto-scaling capability. Memory, CPU, and volume calculations were all taken care of automatically. Hardware procurement, which had been six weeks for every promotion, reduced significantly. We cut TCO. We used a continuous integration / continuous delivery pipeline and ran all the website logins and everything through the platform. For the migration from BusinessWorks to BusinessWorks Container Edition, we don't need to modify any of the functional code blocks. We keep them intact and move them with only a few cosmetic changes. That gives us a lot of confidence, so testing time comes down from weeks to days.” -Rakesh Madireddy, Principal Engineer/p

Metrics

pWith a powerful pairing of TIBCO BusinessWorks and TIBCO BusinessEvents, testing times are reduced from weeks to mere days. They also have increased their volume out-of-the-box ten-fold. /p

The Technology

pTIBCO BusinessWorks connects all of the T-mobiles previous data blocks/silos. In the meantime, TIBCO BusinessEventsb /bgives the user business suggestions and the insights of this newly inter-connected data./p

Disruptive Factor

pWith a newly connected business platform and the ability to interpret and receive business suggestions in real time, T-Mobile now has the capability to see trends in the data and make decisions faster./p

Shining Moment

pTIBCO has transformed T-Mobile from a company of isolated data blocks to an interconnected and powerful company that has the ability to make business decisions quickly and effectively./p