GTE makes smooth back office transition

GTE will announce this week that it has completed the first phase of a transition to a new assignment and service activation system without affecting customer service - and without the normal flash cuts.

Working quietly with Sun Microsystems and Informix Software, GTE has been able to install an internally developed system that will consider the demands of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 - namely the need for local number portability and unbundled local loop elements - while implementing a Web-based front end for call agents.

The new platform is called Assignment, Activation and Inventory Services and replaces an older system that used different elements cobbled together over the years.

"In a large telco environment, the problems can be huge. We deal with 80,000 orders a day," said Milan Gupta, assistant vice president of enterprise systems for GTE.

"Most of the large telcos have this mess of architecture that has evolved over 20 years."

GTE felt the need to migrate to a new system in light of the talent drain that has hit the company and the rest of the industry.

"Our systems evolved over 20 years. Nobody has that kind of brain power supporting these systems anymore," Gupta said.

AAIS, which encompasses almost 2 million lines of code, is expected to save GTE up to $70 million yearly in maintenance and support.

Transitioning to the new system actually began in 1997 when GTE launched a search for a new back-office system to handle new services and the changing requirements of new exchanges that were being bought and sold nationwide.

Just as important was developing a system that could contain a network inventory of all equipment used to provision wireline service. In the legacy systems, this data typically is scattered across several databases.

"The moment you have any data fallout in this type of data conversion, you have a very small window to repair it," Gupta said. "Our problem space was that the data was so proprietary and locked in, we couldn't do a mirror. We put it in a relational database."

GTE also took a slight risk and is running the new system's back-end processing from an Informix engine. "A lot of people might raise an eyebrow at that, but that product has delivered for us," Gupta said.

For customer service reps, the transition will mean a cleaner Web-based interface, which is based entirely on Java. In fact, GTE's position as an early adopter of Java helped speed the project along, said Shahin Khan, vice president of product marketing for Sun's computer systems group.

Within AAIS, GTE is using Sun Enterprise 1000 servers running on the Solaris operating environment. While the servers provide enough horsepower to support 40,000 internal users, the objective is to provide a flexible back end for e-commerce applications.