The Client – SAFARICOM
Safaricom is the biggest communication company in East and Central Africa, delights over 25.1 million subscribers, providing over 200,000 touch points for its customers and offering over 100 different products under its portfolio.
Provides voice, data, financial services and enterprise solutions for a range of subscribers, small businesses and government, using a variety of platforms
Safaricom pioneered commercial mobile money transfer globally through M-PESA, the most successful service of its kind anywhere in the world. Launched in March 2007, M-PESA now has over 23 million customers and over 100,000 M-PESA Agent outlets countrywide.
Requirement
With increasing customer base, safaricom was always looking forward for systems which have could provide the five 9’s availability & levels of scalability, thus ensuring their growth in the market against competitors. They had already outgrown with the existing system which was serving their CRM, Mediation & ERP systems. The management therefore needed a system that would improve reliability, availability & increase C-SAT levels among customer for the wide range of services provided.
Project Duration
From the date the contract was signed with the SAFARICOM until final completion was achieved it took approximately two and a half months. The project was completed within budget.
Solution
Symphony’s solution was based on IBM P-795 boxes & Storage to cater the purpose of consolidation & scalability for the required applications. Systems are highly scalable & ensure the highest availability levels. The latest features ensured higher utilization levels thus improving system efficiency & performance. Issues related to timely reports & performance have drastically gone down as system has sufficient bandwidth to perform month-end /quarter & yearly operations. The integration skills for installing, enabling & fine tuning of systems with additional features was the key area where symphony differentiated from its competitors. The additional features provides flexibility to the system to make sure to cater resources at the time of crunch.
Results
The final result is an IT environment comprising of systems capable of handling large DB’s & performance intensive applications & can scale-up as per the increase in workload thus enabling safaricom to deliver best in class services as compared to its competitor. Several applications including CRM, Mediation & Billing are now providing better response time thus making sure that end of month time is reduced from a time span of weeks to a few days, leading to increase in revenue for the Safaricom. It reflects the management commitment to stay in pace with the emerging technology & thus serving its customer with the best of industry standards.