Oracle Customer Success — Tunisie Telecom

Tunisie Telecom Enhances Customer Experience by Achieving Zero Downtime for Billing System, CRM, and Databases

By modernizing our infrastructure with SPARC servers, we have eliminated service interruptions of key applications used by hundreds of our employees who are constantly interacting with our telecommunications subscribers. This has dramatically improved our service levels, reduced costs, and increased customer loyalty.

— Sami Soudani, IT Production – Executive Director, Tunisie Telecom

Tunisie Telecom is the incumbent telecommunications operator in Tunisia, providing fixed-line, mobile, data, and value-added services to more than 7 million subscribers. Tunisie Telecom has impressive infrastructure, with more than 18,000 km of optical fiber, 3 million copper lines, and more than 13,000 outlets throughout the country. The group is 65% owned by the state, with 35% owned by Emirates International Telecommunications, and includes numerous subsidiaries both in Tunisia and abroad, including an investment company that provides project support to young entrepreneurs in the field of technology.

The telecommunications market in Tunisia has undergone rapid change in the past few years, with mobile tariffs now nearly half the cost of fixed-line calls, where previously they were three times higher. Faced with increasing competition, Tunisie Telecom is highly focused on delivering the best customer experience and improving its services, for example by expanding its network of fiber optic cable.

Challenges

Increase competitiveness in a tightening Tunisian telecommunications market by minimizing service disruptions and enabling rapid time to market for new and exciting services across fixed, mobile, and data services
Streamline hardware infrastructure, some of which was at times only used at half capacity, while increasing the performance of business-critical tools including customer relationship management (CRM), business intelligence (BI), and billing systems

Relieve the strain on the live billing system database—which is accessed by other internal systems including the CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and BI platforms—to prevent slow application performance and frequent system overload especially during business hours where there are high levels of customer contact

Increased business agility, reduced costs, and significantly improved customer service levels and retention by upgrading to SPARC T7-4, T7-2, T5-4, and T5-2 servers to run business critical billing system in addition to CRM, BI, and mobile payment platforms
Reduced the time to provision a new environment from days to hours by using a virtualized infrastructure—shortening time to market for innovative services and increasing the company’s competitiveness in the current telecommunications price war

Eliminated database downtime for critical applications—such as the CRM platform which previously experienced performance issues on a daily basis—with SPARC servers, achieving zero service interruptions in more than eight months since deployment
Enhanced third-party billing system performance significantly by modernizing the infrastructure with SPARC servers—increasing bandwidth and lowering latency to deliver faster transaction speed and eliminate high-cost outages previously caused by system overload
Reduced the strain on the production database while ensuring that hundreds of account managers, finance, and customer service staff have immediate access to up-to-the-minute customer account and billing data, by using Oracle GoldenGate to synchronize key data between the live billing system database and a replica that can be accessed by other internal technologies such as the CRM, BI, and ERP systems
Optimized the use of hardware resources by leveraging Oracle VM as a complete solution to create and manage virtual Solaris machines with zero license cost and near zero performance overhead across development, testing, and production environments
Improved the performance of the CRM application—used concurrently by dozens of customer service, technical support, sales, and marketing employees in addition to more than ten private call centers—by deploying two SPARC machines in active/passive mode to replace three legacy database servers
Increased infrastructure stability, security, performance, and manageability by migrating from Windows operating systems to Oracle Solaris 11.2, enabling the IT team to resolve more than 70% of issues internally and reduce reliance on expensive and time-consuming outsourced support
Streamlined infrastructure resource utilization by creating a virtualized server farm on four clustered SPARC machines using Oracle VM for SPARC—enabling Tunisie Telecom to meet rising demands throughout the organization, for example using it for development and pre-production platforms, and to rapidly provide extra capacity when there is not enough physical hardware
Ensured optimum performance of enterprise applications thanks to seamless integration between SPARC servers and other Oracle technologies including Siebel Customer Relationship Management, Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Database

When choosing a supplier for the technologies that underpin our customer interactions, it is out of the question for us to think of anyone but Oracle. SPARC servers offered us the best price-performance ratio in terms of power, security, and reliability for our key applications.

— Sami Soudani, IT Production – Executive Director, Tunisie Telecom

About Tunisie Telecom

Headquarters

Tunis, Tunisia

Employees

7,000

Annual Revenue

US$500 Million to US$1 Billion

Tunisie Telecom

Partners

Tunisie Telecom worked with Oracle Platinum Partner TMI right from the beginning of the hardware migration project, through to its successful completion, post-implementation support, and training.

“TMI has an extremely well-qualified and professional staff which is able to deliver both implementation and support services. Whenever we need assistance, TMI consultants are extremely responsive, and always available even when we call at nights, during weekends, and on public holidays,” Soudani said.