Claro Brazil Streamlines Billing with Engineered System
 
 

Claro Brazil Streamlines Billing with Engineered System

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Claro Brazil is a cellular telephony provider with a national presence and more than 65 million customers in Brazil. The company operates in more than 3,560 cities with GSM and 3GMax cellular phone technologies. As a leader in content and service innovation, Claro offers roaming voice service in more than 160 countries and data service in more than 140 countries, across five continents. Claro is owned by America Mobile—one of world’s three largest mobile telephony providers.

To maintain Claro’s leadership in the Brazilian market, the company recognized the need to improve transaction processing—for product launches, and campaigns and to manage the third-party (Radware Mobile Service Edge) application that serves as a communication gateway between Claro’s IT, engineering, and partner environments. The application also serves the Value Added Services department, which the company considers as strategically important, due to the new business it generates.

Aiming to guarantee delivering quality customer service and to charge correctly, Claro and Oracle worked together to carry out a proof of concept (POC), in which they migrated a third of the company’s application to the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Half Rack platform. This gave Claro the ability to monitor transaction tickets and increased its processing capacity by18 million additional transactions per week, things that are critical to sustaining new business.

This is not Claro’s first experience with Oracle’s engineered systems, as shortly before the arrival of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the company implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine to support the operator’s business intelligence tool and its tax payment solution. This helped it to achieve regulatory compliance, slashing data extraction time by 50% for generating the fiscal reports required by Anatel—the agency that regulates Brazil’s telecommunications industry.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Claro Brasil S.A.

  • “Our Value Added Services (VAS) department, as a great generator of new business, needed the agility to launch a new campaign without having to acquire new hardware. With Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, we gained the performance that enables us to respond to business demands without impacting our environment or the quality of the services we provide.” – Sandro Trindade de Araújo, Infrastructure Director, Claro Brasil S.A.

  • Manage all transactions that are transmitted through a critical, third-party application responsible for communication between the IT, engineering, and partner environments—ensuring the provision of telephony services to end customers
  • Expand hardware capacity, fulfilling the service level agreement (SLA) the company has with its customers, something the previous system could not provide due to high costs and complex engineering and connectivity
  • Prevent timeouts and ensure better customer service, helping to achieve the strategic business goals of the Value Added Services department
  • Meet regulatory compliance and streamline financial reporting to Anatel—the agency that regulates Brazil’s telecommunications industry—ensuring required deadlines are met

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Enhanced time-to-market by replacing HP Superdome with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, gaining performance and agility to support the company’s new products and services
  • Improved transaction throughput and the environment’s expansion capacity while mitigating operational risks and improving performance, leading to a stricter adherence in fulfilling SLAs
  • Improved control over transaction tickets, which enabled a more detailed billing process, enhancing the quality of services provided
  • Increased processing capacity by 5x, or 18 million additional transactions per week, which significantly impacted revenue by meeting business needs to generate new services and products without changing hardware platform or compromising quality of services to customers
  • Responded more quickly to internal demands related to product launches and sales campaigns, helping to maintain Claro’s position as an extremely competitive player in the mobile communications market
  • Improved the partner experience and capacity for meeting new partners’ SLAs 7x faster and with 35x improvement in Java response time, when compared to HP Superdome
  • Used Oracle Exadata Database Machine to reduce by 50% the time needed to prepare the fiscal report required by Anatel, including data analyses of millions of cell phones, including installations and sales plans

Why Oracle

“We had little experience with engineered systems. Oracle helped us at all stages of the project, from providing equipment to performing the POC, to carrying out data migration, to verifying the actual benefits we obtained. We choose Oracle as our partner, and it’s very beneficial to deal with single vendor, as it helps reduce operational risks. In addition, having a single point of management and a focal point for end-to-end support avoids the fragmented responsibilities that come with multivendor solutions, and it guarantees that we will receive IT services to support business capabilities within time and budget constraints,” said Sandro Trindade de Araújo, infrastructure director, Claro Brasil S.A.

Implementation Process

“We worked with Oracle during the POC at our data center to migrate our third-party IT, engineering, and partner environment application to the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Half Rack platform. By the time we rolled it out, the platform was already handling a third of our total data volume with all of the benefits of capacity expansion, timeout recovery, and transaction-ticket monitoring. We completed the entire implementation without encountering any obstacles, despite the level of complexity, as this involved not only a change of platform, but also of architecture,” Trindade de Araújo said.

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