Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Customer Solution Case Study Service Provider Integrates Mainframe Operations with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Overview Country or Region: United States Industry: Professional Services - Communications Customer Profile CSG Systems, based in Englewood, Colorado, is a leading provider of customer interaction management solutions serving the broader information, communication, and entertainment industries. Business Situation CSG needed to integrate its mainframebased applications with a more agile delivery mechanism to reduce the time required to create new product offerings. It also wanted to integrate a relational data store. Solution CSG created its Business Services Platform solution using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0, and deployed Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition as a relational database. Benefits Faster product development Agility to serve new markets Better view of the business Competitive advantage Our agile approach to development is well supported by Microsoft development tools and SQL Server, which helps keep our internal and external customers closely involved in the whole process. Brad Allgood, Vice President of the Echostar Strategic Business Unit, CSG Systems CSG Systems needed to create a more agile front end for the mainframe-based applications it uses to provide customer care, order management, and billing solutions for the convergent cable, direct broadcast satellite and communications industries. As this industry becomes more dynamic and competitive, CSG customers need the ability to more rapidly change the pricing and combination of service packages offered to customers. The company used Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to create its Business Services Platform. The solution which CSG has just begun offering, will give customers agility to swiftly react to market needs, and provide a better view of the business as its integrated Business Services Platform displays the information in one screen that used to require a user to traverse through countless mainframe terminal screens.
Fast Facts Total subscriber accounts managed by CSG Primary data store Integration relational database Legacy development environment Over 45 million IBM mainframe VSAM files SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition COBOL, Java, Perl scripts, C, C++ New development environment Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition Improvement in development time Application Platform Capabilities Orders of magnitude Development, data management Situation CSG Systems is a leading provider of customer interaction management solutions serving the broader information, communication, and entertainment industries, Based in Englewood, Colorado, CSG generated revenue of U.S.$419.3 million for fiscal 2007 by helping its clients build and launch new services, engage customers through a growing set of on- and off-line channels, and reliably transact with customers. CSG s heritage is providing customer management and billing solutions to North American cable and direct broadcast satellite (DBS) companies. The company s solutions help its customers more quickly bring competitive convergent services to market, enabling its communications industry customers to better adapt to the competitive and rapidly changing marketplace. Through supporting its industry customers as an application service provider CSG handles accounts for over 45 million cable and DBS subscribers. For more than two decades CSG has provided its services based on its proprietary applications hosted on an IBM mainframe computer and on servers running the UNIX operating system. The applications continue to serve the company well, but in recent years the competitive marketplace in which its customers operate has become more demanding, requiring greater agility on the part of CSG to rapidly adjust to the services packaging and billing needs of its customers. If a communications company wants to offer Internet access, IP telephone service, movies on demand, or other services either individually, or in specially priced packages, it must first ensure that its customer service and billing infrastructure is prepared to support the changes. Customer demands are continually changing. But working with the mainframe in COBOL or working with more than 250 UNIX-based applications in C++, JAVA, and Perl can be like turning a large ship to get things changed and implemented. CSG customers need the ability to change their service offerings more quickly, which means that CSG needs the agility to swiftly respond to their needs with frontend customer facing support products. Additionally, customers expressed a preference for having their information stored in a relational database, rather than the virtual storage access method (VSAM) files used on the mainframe, as the VSAM files were perceived as being difficult to work with. Solution CSG Systems created a new application suite that it has just begun offering customers called the CSG Business Services Platform (BSP), a solution to help cable and DBS companies service business customers. The Business Services Platform includes the Product Portfolio Manager and the Product Configurator, for defining bundled service offerings with robust support for complex business offerings. The company created its solution using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition development system that integrates with a relational data store hosted on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition database software.
CareExpress e-bill / e-pay BSP GUI management, which served as one building block for the CSG Business Services Platform. The Business Services Platform was created with a multi-tier architecture including: External Interfaces Statement Processing Mainframe Billing Interface Business Services Platform architecture Mainframe Adapter Web Services Account / Billing info App. Server BSP Process Data Warehouse Activate Billing Statement Bundle Definition BSP Domain BSP SQLServer DB Workbench Portfolio Manager Provisioning Interfaces The wizard-driven Product Configurator supports creation and bundling of voice, video, and data products and other services. It supports definition of market segmentation rules and targeted sales campaigns to create customized sales offerings for specific target markets, and enables the easy definition of product/service packages and bundles, including dependencies, options, and pricing. The company decided to build its Business Services Platform using the Microsoft Application Platform because of the successful experiences enjoyed by Telution, a software company CSG had recently acquired. Telution had used the Microsoft Application Platform to create its COMX solution for service creation and service User Interface Tier. BSP is accessed using a client-based application. The client was created using Visual Studio 2005. Application Tier. Created using Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0, the application tier includes the Product Portfolio Manager and the Product Configurator which together provide an easy-to-use interface for product configuration and supporting services. The application tier is hosted on a collection of load-balanced servers running the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 operating system. A third-party load balancing solution is used. Application Data Tier. A single instance of SQL Server 2005 provides a relational data store for information used in supporting the application tier and integrating with the legacy applications. SQL Server is hosted on two clustered IBM xseries 366 server computers with four 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 gigahertz (Ghz). High availability within this environment is achieved by using the Microsoft Clustering feature of the Microsoft 2003 Server Enterprise Edition R2 Operating System. Legacy Applications. The company s legacy applications continue to be hosted on its mainframe and a collection of UNIX computers. The mainframe holds some 12 terabytes of data in VSAM files. In future releases, the company is exploring additional data that may be migrated into the SQL Server database. Benefits CSG Systems is impressed with how well Microsoft development tools support its agile product development and appreciates its
Building our solution on SQL Server and the rest of the Microsoft Application Platform has enabled us to ensure tighter integration with the mainframe, reducing the time required to roll out new products. David Moore, Director of Operations, CSG Systems International enhanced agility to serve new markets. The company s internal users have gained a better view of the business, and CSG believes the new solution will enhance its competitive advantage in the marketplace. Agile Product Development CSG has experienced developers who use an agile methodology of product development that includes rapid prototyping and keeping customers internal and external closely involved in product definition and creation to help ensure that the final application strongly matches customer needs. The company has found that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 are a good match for its agile methodology. Our agile approach to development is well supported by Microsoft development tools and SQL Server, which helps us keep our internal and external customers closely involved in the whole process, says Brad Allgood, Vice President of the Echostar Strategic Business Unit at CSG Systems. We re able to do rapid prototyping and show our customers frequent builds so they can give us extremely useful feed back, such as: I wouldn t use that feature, but we really need this one. Agile development is far more productive than the more standard development model of defining a set of product requirements up front, and then working for nine months before seeing if the product actually meets the customer s frequently evolving needs. Creating its Business Services Platform using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 has contributed to the agility CSG requires to more rapidly respond to the needs of its cable and direct broadcast satellite customers. In the past if a customer wanted to introduce a new services package that included cable, IP telephone service, and video on demand at one monthly price, CSG would have had to change code on the mainframe, which can take weeks or months, depending on what applications were involved. It was a long and arduous process, says David Moore, Director of Operations at CSG Systems. With our new solution based on the Microsoft Application Platform we will be able to make changes much more rapidly. We will be able to respond to our customer needs orders of magnitude faster compared to changing code on the mainframe. The Product Configurator has built in testing to verify that newly configured packages are properly handled by backend systems. Previously, additional days could be added to new product development as new code was processed by the mainframe in nightly batches. We used to run code account changes through the mainframe, and then in the morning see what didn t work, fix it, and then send it through in the next evening s batch, says Moore. Building our solution on SQL Server and the rest of the Microsoft Application Platform has enabled us to ensure tighter integration with the mainframe, reducing the time required to roll out new products. Agility to Serve New Markets The agility CSG has gained from its development methodology and it s new Business Services Platform will enable it to support its cable and direct broadcast satellite customers as they pursue opportunities in new markets. For example, cable operators have traditionally served the residential market, but are expanding into providing services to businesses. Our agile development methods supported with Microsoft development tools make it easier for us to change our code base to create high-value offerings for new markets,
Our agile development methods supported with Microsoft development tools make it easier for us to change our code base to create highvalue offerings for new markets. Brad Allgood, Vice President of the Echostar Strategic Business Unit at CSG Systems says Allgood. We are able to prototype solutions more quickly than before, which makes it easier for us to enter new markets. The company plans to use its ability to rapidly develop new offerings to support its customers wanting to enter the business market, because of the flexibility inherent in negotiating pricing and features when dealing with businesses. Building upon the Microsoft Application Platform CSG will be able to take its sophisticated billing engine that has decades of proven history, and integrate it with a new front end that will give customers the flexibility they need to respond to the kind of pricing and servicing negotiations required to operate in the business market. This will be a huge benefit for CSG and our customers, says Moore. To have provided this same kind of flexibility with our mainframe alone would have required a significant re-write of application code. We needed the Microsoft Application Platform because it works so well with our own agile development methods. Better View of the Business CSG s internal users are enjoying a better experience working with the rich graphical user interface of the BSP, which enables greater productivity than their previous environment which involved shifting between green screen reports on IBM 3270 terminals. The integrated user interface also provides a better view into the business. The Product Configurator we built with the Microsoft Application Platform gives users a single consolidated view of the data, says Moore. It unites data from what used to require hundreds of different green screen reports. When we tested our solution, the response was: How soon can we get this? It offers a stark contrast to the 3270 screens previously used for configuration Prior to the integrated solution, performing pricing analysis of a service across all geographic markets could be time consuming. On the old 3270 screens, we would have to go market by market through perhaps 100 markets, typing them in each time to walk through the entire list, says Moore. With our Product Configurator, a customer will be able to simply pull up a listing of all of its markets, and will be able to very rapidly, from a single screen, identify which of my markets are billing low, which are billing high. From a single screen we can do pricing analysis across the entire operations. This is a huge benefit, as the ease of use yields a better view of the business and will make our customers much more efficient. Competitive Advantage CSG has long been a leader in its field, and with the development of its Business Services Platform, has helped extend its competitive advantage. Our industry has historically used mainframe-based solutions, says Moore. By integrating our powerful mainframe applications with the agility of the Microsoft Application Platform we re in the forefront of providing the faster product development and flexibility that our convergent cable and direct broadcast satellite customers need to compete in this highly competitive industry. In summary, CSG Systems was able to gain greater agility for its mainframe-based solutions by creating its Business Services Platform using Visual Studio 2005, the Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0, and SQL Server 2005.
For More Information For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-ofhearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.com For more information about CSG Systems software- and services-based solutions, call (800) 366-2744 or visit the Web site at: www.csgsystems.com Microsoft Server Product Portfolio For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to: www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage missioncritical information and confidently run today s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it s part of Windows Server System, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments. For more information about SQL Server 2005, go to: www.microsoft.com/sqlserver Software and Services Microsoft Servers Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition R2 Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition Technologies Microsoft.NET Framework 2.0 Hardware IBM xseries 366 server computer with four 64-bit Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 Ghz This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published September 2008