Keeping it together

Going DIP - Celfocus Digital Integration Platform

Why integration is paramount in all businesses

Traveling is a lot of fun. I can’t really say what my favourite trip was because I’m always thinking about the next one.

For me, it is about discovering, getting out of my comfort, seeing the world through a different set of lenses. Although travelling is my favourite pastime, seldom it isn’t about the journey but the destiny.

The reason why is simple. Getting to the destination can be a pain and most of the time it is. Coordinating flights, time zones and other means of transportation can be a huge hurdle and unfortunately, often, a major buzz kill, when things don’t go according to plan.

Sometimes it feels like we all rely on cosmos energy to ensure planes will wait for us, tropical storms won’t affect travelling and simply, we will get at the airport on time, or do we? Cosmos energy is important but don’t count on it to get you to your next destination.

Underneath it all, there are people and systems to ensure your next holiday to Bali goes as smoothly as possible. Systems that, although not developed to work together, were integrated so that they can work seamlessly, despite having a very diverse origin and objective.

Integration is a key word in this context and why, among all the variables that can impact our journeys, we still get to our destiny. Integration between systems enables data to be shared, validated and enables a comprehensive IT ecosystem to be built.

Digital has put business on steroids, everything runs faster, is more connected, making integration today more important than ever. The same principles apply to telecommunications, where Celfocus’ DNA rests.

Like traveling, connecting by phone, messaging, email, video,… PersonA to PersonB to BusinessC, and so on, is only possible due to a rich and disparate set of IT applications. Likewise, in the travelling and leisure industry, integration plays a central role in telecommunications.

Celfocus’ experience and track record, together with a strong business knowledge, have played an important role in understanding the industry’s evolution and how to address new realities, such as, the digital impact and its articulation with legacy systems.

The IT landscape is rapidly changing, with the fast-paced market of OTT and multiple customer-facing channels forcing CSPs to reinvent their integration. Celfocus’ conviction is that integration past is still in place but needs to adapt, addressing the challenges CSPs face today. Celfocus’ answer to this new reality is Celfocus Digital Integration Platform. A modular integration architecture that addresses multiple CSP needs, including:

• Unified Service Catalogue for all invoking channels, exposing all underlying functions;
• Management and metering of all calls to the system architecture;
• OOTB cross-cutting ESB capabilities, provided as microservices;
• Microservice framework for feature development;
• Continuous Integration & Delivery backbone;
• Cloud-native solution with containerized ESB;
• CSM/OpenAPI compliant;
• Enforcement of development patterns and procedures.

Celfocus Digital Integration platform is a modular but cohering solution comprised of the following modules:

1.Microservices

This cluster provides the base set of tools for development, container management and service governance, enabling the adoption of a microservice architecture.

Solutions are designed as functional blocks that target a single challenge, provide a single feature, and are resilient on that task. Designed from the data model to the services they expose, microservices provide clear definition of entity mastership, allowing for a mix of technologies to be used, and clearly define dependencies from one microservice to the next.

Delivered as containers, microservices are base portable and horizontally scalable units that have no impact on functionality. This increases quality on the delivery lifecycle and optimizes resource usage.

2.Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

This SOA layer avails standardized messages and entities to interact with BSS and OSS systems, based on TMForum's standard information model and domain definition. It is then enriched with cross-cutting framework features that ensure development standardization and out-of-the-box features, such as, functional/process logging or configuration-driven error management.

Celfocus Digital Integration Platform's approach to the ESB delivers framework features such as microservices to clearly segregate load and execution times between the core integration and its added features. Not only cloud-native, the integration platform may also be delivered as containerized, presenting the same benefits as seen on the microservices layer.

3.API Management

The API layer acts as a single service catalogue for all channels. It defines the standard to expose all services, such as OpenAPI. Celfocus advocates that services and entities from backends are defined as seen on SID, and API Management will transform them to the OpenAPI-compliant catalogue.

Strongly focused on security, API's Management module controls access by a given system/user based on thresholds and conditions. It also protects systems below and increase channel response times. Having access to all invocations promotes APIs monetization: the CSP can charge its partners, based on their usage of the service catalogue.

4.Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Considering all building blocks of Celfocus Digital Integration Platform multi-layered architecture, several technologies are used to deliver services and capabilities on a given CSP context. This raises a concern on service governance, as it requires multiple delivery, validation and deployment processes and tools to ensure solution stability and overall service quality.

To address these topics, Celfocus Digital Integration Platform presents a Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery pipeline. This set of tools monitors artefacts and environments, builds and deploys functionalities and validates the target environment against a set of required tests. So, it streamlines software delivery lifecycle from development to support, promoting faster overall feature delivery and ensuring quality and availability, yielding control on any heterogeneous infrastructure.

Now that you know more about the impact of integration in the telecommunication industry, maybe it’s time for a little reward. What about scheduling your next holiday?

For more information about Celfocus Digital Integration Platform, click here.