The client had a working portal that was technologically outdated and was hindering further developments.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.
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.