stc Wholesale

Project Stories

Addressing  fast-changing market demands

About the client/ project:

stc owns and operates the largest, most reliable, and diverse state-of-art telecommunications infrastructure in the Middle East Region. Its National network covers all areas of the Kingdom and is extended to link all neighbouring countries including UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Qatar, Yemen, Iraq, and Oman, through diversified fiber links with various paths and capacities.

stc is the leading telecommunications provider and its Wholesale BU is the leading wholesaler in the Region, offering national and international services over numerous cable systems and via its PoPs-extended network.

stc's Wholesale Business Unit was established in order to effectively address the interconnection and other services requirements of licensed telecommunications operators within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well as telecommunications services requirements of other service providers within the Middle East Region and elsewhere.

In 2022, the Wholesale Business Unit was looking to consolidate its ongoing digital transformation, by aligning its Portal solution with stc group’s Digital Reference Architecture (DRA). The end goal was to create more synergies with other stc Business Units (eg: Enterprise).

The Wholesale Portal Migration project focused on the technical migration of the portal to match the group’s DRA, while providing the capabilities to cope with fast-changing market demands that call for shortened delivery timeframes and new features time-to-market.

The project started in July 2022 with an assessment, analysis, design, and development followed from September 2022; SIT phase was conducted from June to September 2023 and the portal was deployed to production in October 2023.

Currently, we are in a phase of support, focusing on corrective and evolutive maintenance.

What & how did we deliver?

Celfocus was asked to develop the revamped mywholesale web portal: the self‑service portal for both Employees and Customers of stc Wholesale business unit (WBU), using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as Single Page Applications (SPAs) built in React.

The portal accessed stc's System of Record (SoR) managed by ZIRA, via a decoupling layer developed by TCS that includes APIM (Apigee), ESB (Webmethods), and FDA (based on Kafka).

The legacy portal’s functionalities were documented using Celfocus Facilitation Maps, while a design system was built in Figma with wireframes describing the portal’s features. The development was made in an interactive approach, with scheduled demonstrations of the frontend developments to the customer.

Celfocus faced a big challenge regarding system’s integration as APIs were not available according to the plan, as they were also being transformed to comply with TMF OpenAPI standard.

What was the added value for the client?

stc’s WBU aligned the Portal solution with the group’s DRA, allowing the creation of synergies with other Business Units (eg: Enterprise). The new portal provides capabilities to allow stc to address the fast-changing market demands, with shorter time-to-market for new features and product categories.

The new portal delivered additional features compared to legacy, with regards to invoice and complaints management. Currently, there are new features under development to extend the WBU offers with partner products, aligning with a new stc Group Operating Model.

What was the added value for Celfocus?

The WBU Portal reference is important for Celfocus, as it is the first project Celfocus delivered to production under stc’s Digital Transformation program.

The success of this project allows Celfocus to extend its footprint in Saudi Arabia, which is a very interesting, growing, and demanding market.

Overall, the experience in WBU Portal was a relevant learning journey, improving Celfocus understanding of stc’s organization and its way of working. We are better prepared to deliver successful projects in stc’s Business Enablement department while having a stronger reference to qualifies us to pursue new opportunities in other departments.

Who's the team?

Upcoming:

stc is continuing with the functional development of mywholesale portal:

• Customer Service: there’s an ongoing initiative to review the Customer Experience for customer service and trouble ticketing; the reimagined journeys will require frontend adaptations;
• Partner Offers: the wholesale customers will be able to access stc’s partners offers via the portal, and this change will be reflected in the product catalog and the request for proposal sections of the portal.