Executive Summary
CIO 100 Winner: The project that cost Aircel and the outsourcer Rs 500 crore, went live in February 2009 and eight new circles were launched. Aircel ran product evaluation parallel to business process mapping, adopting Agile methodologies and empowering project teams.
Aircel, the Rs 3,500-crore subsidiary of Maxis Mobile Services is fast emerging as a name to reckon with in the India telecom space. Within 18 months of its launch, it has become the leading telecom operator in Chennai. But the company wasn't always this successful.
Case Study Highlights
"Till 2007, Aircel was a regional operator," says Ravinder Jain, CIO, Aircel. "While Aircel was leading in four of its 10 circles, it was eighth or ninth in most new circles it wanted to launch in - including two metros. We wanted to shed the regional tag and have pan-India operations."
So in July 2008, the company set a target for itself: to launch eight new circles by March 2009. In the way were IT systems that were "all obsolete", says Jain, complete with homegrown applications; disparate, non-standard networks; and non- integrated systems. All of these lengthened time-to-market for new products.
"We wanted to create a tier-one telco grade IT landscape to deal with future growth and technology obsolesce. We were looking for total transformation," Jain says. The challenge? To go from one end of the IT spectrum to the other in 18 months. "It was a stiff and challenging target," he says.
In February 2008, Jain decided to take the outsourcing route. Still there was much to be done. Aircel had to evaluate a new set of products, document their existing processes and develop a new set of world-class ones as well as a new system architecture, and set up the infrastructure for development, testing, pre-production and production environments.
By running product evaluation in parallel with business process mapping, adopting Agile methodologies and empowering project teams, Jain and his team met the deadline. He also credits their success to including dedicated business teams to the project teams and using eTOM framework to define their new processes. Along the way, the team also built a datacenter in 24 days.
By February 2009, the project which cost Aircel and the outsourcer Rs 500 crore, went live and the eight new circles were launched. Today, all Aircel's applications are integrated using an enterprise service bus. Individual user IDs and passwords have been replaced by single sign-on. And the new platform has been the basis for the launch of some industry first's including Aircel's 'Pocket Internet'.
The Person Behind It
“So many industry firsts became possible for us only due to our new IT stack."
Other Telecom Case Studies
Vodafone Gains 99.99 Percent Uptime with Alternate CRM
A case study on CRM in TelecomEvery minute of CRM downtime cost Vodafone India over 6,500 customers. In a fiercely competitive industry, that’s a number its CIO knew the company couldn’t afford.
