Competition, consolidation, SOA in Hong Kong

Hong Kong has been a hotbed of mobile competition for several years, with at least five carriers competing for the hearts and wallets of about 7 million people. Just over a year ago, two of those carriers — New World Mobility and CSL — merged in a deal that created the largest carrier in the market.

The new firm, now called CSL New World Mobility, is roughly 76% owned by Australian telco Telstra — which had been the sole previous owner of CSL — and about 24% owned by New World Mobility. While some aspects of the ensuing integration were easy to tackle — both carriers already used Nokia as a core vendor — other aspects weren't so quick and easy to finish. With the merger and ever-increasing competition in mind, the carrier has set about moving to a more efficient services-oriented architecture (SOA).

Cecilia Tseung, vice president of information technology and customer services for CSL New World Mobility, told Telephony during a recent visit to the U.S. that the company is just entering the second phase of its integration process and is focused on transforming legacy service development and delivery processes.

“When I started [on the project], there were a lot of legacy service systems in place,” she said. “Everything was running as a silo system. It takes time to change all that, but competition is fierce. As a mobile operator in Hong Kong, time is something that we don't have.”

CSL New World Mobility's processes might be complex since the carrier uses three brands — 1010, One2Free and New World Mobility — to deliver services to three market segments: business, consumers and the youth demographic.

Tseung said the company was looking for solutions to enable faster service activation and easier access to warehoused customer data by integrating its customer relationship management system with other systems. The carrier went with vendor TIBCO's BusinessWorks platform.

TIBCO promotes BusinessWorks as an SOA software component, and although Tseung confirms the software improved CSL New World Mobility's service efficiency, she isn't necessarily interested in hyping the SOA concept.

“The term SOA is really a buzzword that was not even born yet at the time we started looking at this project,” Tseung said. “What we really started out with was a need to do enterprise application integration for our whole enterprise, and we worked with TIBCO to develop the new architecture.” She added that this new architecture will serve the carrier well as it looks to launch new services.