By: Suhail Thusu, Sr. Manager Solution Consulting – Tecnotree

In the ever-evolving telco industry, organizations are trying to leverage benefits offered by open digital architectures that enable interoperability and provide capabilities to create, evolve, and manage new digital offerings.

TM Forum champions this cause and through its Open APIs provides a standard interface for the exchange of complex data models, thereby accelerating the process of digital innovation. Open APIs allow organizations including communications service providers (CSPs) to leverage a wide ecosystem of components built either in-house or by the numerous ISVs which serve the telco industry due to standardized interfaces provided by Open APIs.

Tecnotree delivers world-class OSS/BSS and partner ecosystem solutions for telcos, empowering them to deliver insightful and connected customer experiences to their enterprises, consumers, and partners. The company helps CSPs transform their businesses into a marketplace of digital services and empowers them to monetize service bundles, provide personalized user experiences and augment value throughout the customer lifecycle. Tecnotree Digital Business Support System (BSS) solution stack provides TMF-compliant Open APIs, as the organization was the first to earn Platinum Badge for Open APIs from TM Forum.

Using TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework as a guiding structure, Tecnotree has developed the below digital architecture using MongoDB as the underlying technology which features agility, scaling, accessibility, and cloud nativity.

MongoDB has been the database of choice for Tecnotree’s solutions due to the inherent features it provides, namely a flexible data model, rich query API, and being highly-performant, available, and scalable. The database powers digital innovations, generates value and enables flexible scalability for our customers through Open Digital Architectures. The document-based architecture — an intuitive data model that enables developers, provides a flexible schema and delivers horizontal scalability — maps to the objects in code.

Since the JSON documents are stored directly, Tecnotree spends less time converting objects to and from relational models. These same JSON schemas ensure that the data is valid in all layers of the stack: UI, API, middleware, and database. It is also easy to tune the performance, which is critical when handling increasingly large traffic volumes in the telecommunications industry.

The comprehensive suite of tools enable support for a wide range of mission-critical use cases.

These include:

• Search. An integrated full-text search is included, removing the need to run a separate search system alongside the database.
• Queryable encryption. Allows customers to run expressive queries on fully randomized encrypted data – security without sacrificing performance.
• Time series. Database users can optimize for the demands of time series workloads—streaming data ingestion, indexing, fast query processing, and compressed storage footprint.
• Dynamic scalability. Provides automatic scale up and down to accommodate traffic increase or reduce costs during lulls in traffic.
• Mobile integration. With out-of-the-box networking code and conflict resolution, Atlas Device Sync accelerates mobile application development while ensuring that end-user devices are responsive and performant, regardless of connectivity.
• Application-driven analytics. Provides a suite of unified capabilities and connectors to make data collection and storage, data transformation, decision-making, and insight delivery much easier. Blend data across clusters and cloud storage and export in your preferred analytical format or simply connect your favorite BI tool, like Tableau, MicroStrategy, SAP, and more, directly to Atlas, and use Charts to explore and visualize data.

Due to the increasing volume of data generated by the onset of 5G and the growth of IoT devices, flexible scalability is one area of particular importance. MongoDB supports horizontal scaling through sharding and the ability to reshard with minimal downtime (~2 seconds).

It further powers Tecnotree’s Digital Customer Lifecycle Management Suite, empowering CSPs to execute intuitive customer interactions and innovate their existing systems and processes while adopting new strategies. The solution includes some key use cases such as:

• Customer 360 view
• Omni-channel experience
• Trouble tickets
• Loyalty and rewards programs
• Subscription manager
• Customer onboarding and service lifecycle
• Catalog-driven order fulfillment
• Resource and inventory management
• Service provisioning to network elements and third-party platforms

Introduction of 5G connectivity has opened several new business opportunities for CSPs, making new revenue streams and industry verticals available to them. With an integrated digital ecosystem and automated processes, organizations can maximize the benefits of new and legacy technologies, enabling business growth. And with these set of tools, Tecnotree is addressing the goal of building digital ecosystems by helping customers evolve to the next stage of innovation.

Contributed by:

Author bio:

Suhail Thusu is part of Product Office team at Tecnotree, currently responsible for defining solution deployment architecture for Cloud as well as On-Premise deployments for digital transformations projects for CSPs across the globe. He is also responsible for Technology Partnerships within Tecnotree.