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Orange My Account
Executive summary 

Orange, one of the largest telecom operators in Europe, needed a partner with the required experience and know-how for their customer care portal in Romania, Orange My Account. Establishing a long-term partnership with Tremend, the company managed to successfully build and maintain this complex solution, which allows customization of personal information and management of services and options. Built using Spring, Hibernate, Memcached, WebLogic and Oracle, with integration of dozens of internal systems using Web Services and JMS, it serves several million customers.

 

 

The client 

Orange is a multinational telecommunications corporation, global provider of voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications. Offering professional services to businesses and to over 226 million consumers, it is one of the world leaders in providing telecommunication services to multinational companies.

Business Challenge 

The client had a working portal that was technologically outdated and was hindering further developments. The competition was using modern interfaces for web care, whereas Orange’s portal was falling behind in usability studies. The marketing department had problems in cross-selling or upselling and the IT department was finding it difficult to keep the website running during peak times. The challenge was to build a complex solution that would fix all this problems and would include essential features like electronic invoice, detailed invoice and time usage as well as a mobile version. A main source of concern was the scalability of the portal, as it required to handle several million concurrent users during peak times.

Solution delivered by Tremend 

Tremend analysed the client’s requirements and translated them into detailed wireframes using Balsamiq Mockups. After several sessions of feedback with Orange’s Marketing and Online teams, Tremend reached an agreed solution and provided a general architecture to support the portal and further changes. A prototype was built to validate the architecture and the integration points. The application uses Java Service Messaging services (asynchronous communication) to access the Orange CRM data, which involves a different approach to the UI/UX than a regular application that uses synchronous responses (like querying a database). The solution was deployed in a distributed Oracle Weblogic environment with several active instances. Caching strategies were employed, using transparent caching based on Memcached. Performance testing was done using Apache JMeter.

Implementation 

The development included integrations with several external components:

  • Orange SSO - the Single Sign On services
  • Avangate ePayment - for recharge and invoice payment
  • Orange internal CRM
  • Various web services

Services for other components were exposed using REST services. Asynchronous messaging was used in order to provide a scalable solution for Orange’s customers. Most requests that query the Orange CRM or change customers’ profiles were made using Oracle Weblogic message queues.

Technologies

Java
Spring
Hibernate
JPA
DWR
Oracle
jQuery
Memcached
Apache JMeter
Results 

The solution provided by Tremend allows Orange to better present and promote its services to the customers, as it integrates all the required features and was specially built to handle more than 10 million users. Having a solid platform to built upon, services like Orange Cloud and Orange TV are continuously added to the platform and electronic invoice support allowed the company to move users from costly print to online. Some of other benefits include:

  • Scalability
  • Modern, highly usable interface
  • Users are no longer affected by the unavailability or slow response of other Orange services in peak times or holidays
  • Mobile versions allow clients to easily access the platform
  • Better integration with the entire Orange portal
  • Better services such as Recharge or Anonymous recharge that bring in more revenue
  • The new platform APIs are used by other Orange services, as it is the basis of a Service Oriented Architecture
  • The possibility of upselling current services and options
  • The Electronic invoice allows less paper print and more users using the online services, which implies substantial cost savings.