Westnet, an Australian ISP, implemented TIBCO BusinessWorks to integrate its various systems and accelerate service provisioning. The project objectives were to remove dependency on a single vendor and achieve a unified integration solution. BusinessWorks was selected for its strengths in connectivity, interoperability, and development tools. Initial integrations like a B2B gateway reduced development time from weeks to days. Outcomes included accelerated development, reduced errors, and a robust integration architecture. Future plans include expanding use of the platform.
Thank Brett Hannath & Adrian Lewis for inviting me to speak to you this morning. I’m here to tell you a bit about Westnet’s experiences in using TIBCO’s Integration Software (BusinessWorks) – the challenges we faced and the benefits realised.
I’ll begin by telling you a bit about Westnet and explain the business hurdles and technical objectives that drove this project. Then I’ll briefly run through the selection process and the criteria that ultimately helped us choose TIBCO. Then I’ll Run through the implementation of our first interface and briefly discuss other interfaces we integrated and the challenges we came across, then finish up with the observations and benefits realised from the project.
Westnet is a regionally focused ISP, established in Geraldton in 1994. Today the business has a national service capability offering: etc. We are also diversifying beyond access products and partnering with content providers such as MS Xbox, Barclay’s EPL, 3FL and IPTV. Westnet’s customer base is over 220,000 primarily residential. Revenue this financial year is forecasted at $145M, $10M up on last FY. Westnet was 100% acquired by iiNet Ltd in May 08, taking the group’s active services to over 680,000 and the outright 3 rd largest ISP in Australia behind Telstra and Optus.
Westnet’s market proposition has always been based on customer service (humanology). This has been recognised by service awards from PC Authority, Australian Broadband Survey and AC Nielsen. Westnet has 550 staff primarily in Perth, with a 1000 strong agent reseller network. The technical teams are divided into two departments: Network Operations and Information Systems. The IS department is discipline focused, broken into architecture, software dev, test, DB and BI teams. Westnet is historically a Microsoft shop, using Windows Servers, .NET and SQL Server.
In early 2007 the limitations of Westnet’s billing system (Plat – Tucows) came to a head when it is was unable to support mobile. It was originally purposed for Dial and DSL, and some with some work arounds it was able to support telephony, but it was after exploring options with Tucows to pay higher support fees, fund additional resource or purchase the code base Westnet decided it could on longer grow with the current solution. This initiated an investigation to determine how to swap out Platypus, and the findings were:
What started as a simple environment quickly grew complex with scale.
This is an example of the high level service architecture which supports DSL1.
Technical objectives were spawned independent of the billing system swap. The business realised it had to abstract its systems from vendor specifics, or face being driven by vendor capabilities and limitations. Westnet decided to move from it’s former approach of heterogeneous integration to a homogeneous model by introducing a purpose built software solution to handle A2A, B2B and Bulk Data transactions.
Early in the piece, Westnet attempted a proof of concept of Microsoft BizTalk as it was free under our Gold Partnership. It proved the principles of Integration were worthwhile, but the product lacked maturity and it was cumbersome in design. With a better idea of what was required, we chose to buy a more complete integration framework. Westnet investigated 30 vendors, short listed 4 for investigation. These were some of the key criteria that appealed with TIBCO. In terms of a vendor:
Vendor report
Technical report
The lessons learnt from the PoC defined some specific technical criteria. Data Transformation, not just of XML but CSV’s, etc. Extract-Transform-Load, to sync systems. Development Env: The ability to graphically design orchestrations/processes in line with our BPM designs.
Sent 2 senior developers to BW training – returned, and setup the basis of a dev, staging and prod environment within 2 weeks in preparation for the first project. We chose not to implement a new interface as we were not keen on introducing time as a constraint. Westnet had sold telephony for several years but always carried out all the provisioning steps manually, so this was an ideal candidate to automate. In hindsight, it could have been a foolhardy choice as the Telstra interface had complex authentication and session management requirements.
LOLIG Interface contained 21 web services with 51 operations
The next interface we developed was a new wholesale interface to iiNet to resell DSL2. iiNet limited to TCP sockets, DB adapter.
Credit Check: SOAP over HTTP service to score customers at signup. Telstra IPND: Flat file.
Team of 2 carrying out every step of the SDLC. Initially thought to grow the discipline into the existing team structure, but quickly realised it was a specialised skill for expert execution. Bottleneck in resources, but have been pleasantly surprised at the rapid SDLC. Admin challenge in pager, maintenance, etc. Leading on from resource limitations: prioritisation.
Codeless IDE significantly accelerated development time to two thirds design, one third code. Less error prone, and shorter test phase. OOTB, persistance make job tracking simple