Nexign Enables MegaFon to Reduce Time to Market by Two–Five Times

MegaFon was evolving as a group of companies that became its subsidiaries after the restructuring process in 2009. To take the business to the next level and facilitate digital transformation, MegaFon needed to consolidate the subsidiaries’ IT infrastructures. The subsidiaries were using seven separate billing solutions with a different logic and a custom code, which caused an array of challenges. Such a variety of BSS systems did not allow the company to fully unify its business processes. It also hindered the launch of new offerings, made the integration of partner services more complicated, and required considerable investments to maintain these systems.

In 2015, MegaFon decided to shift to a unified billing system and set the following strategic goals:

• Support digital and business transformation
• Improve the quality of customer service
• Centralize and accelerate the launch of new business projects
• Create an ecosystem that will facilitate and accelerate the integration of external partners
• Optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the billing system by 20–30%

The project required the simultaneous migration of 75 million subscribers to a new platform and the continued support of legacy billing solutions until their full replacement. The operator’s and Nexign’s teams had a thorough work plan and migrated B2C subscribers seamlessly: new rate plans were immediately added to the new billing system, while the existing ones were migrated gradually.

 

The project is unique in many ways. Together with MegaFon, we provided a comprehensive systems transformation. In addition to BSS modernization, the company also had to undergo crucial organizational and process changes.

Mikhail Matyushin

Chief Technology Officer, Nexign

Middle Layer and Microservices Factory

The harmonization of billing processes reduced the time to market for the new products. However, to keep with the pace of modernization in the telecom market, it was imperative for MegaFon to further speed up the transformation. Therefore, MegaFon and Nexign created a layer of microservices above billing, which enabled the operator’s developers and external suppliers to create and test new projects promptly.

Thanks to this extra layer, the time to market for a new functionality was slashed from several quarters to two to three weeks. MegaFon gained capabilities to quickly solve piloting and testing tasks without making changes to the billing core.

Moreover, the Middle Layer facilitated the integration of new partners. The plethora of microservices consolidated at this level allows for successful partner cooperation.

Using the microservices, MegaFon had launched over 100 projects by autumn 2020.

Product Catalog

Nexign’s Product Catalog is a central configuration point for the operator’s offerings. It supports the entire product lifecycle, from product creation and adjustment of price and other parameters to decommissioning. The Catalog provides MegaFon with the information required for coordinated operation of rating, self-service, billing, order management, settlement payments, and other functionality. With the ongoing partnership, features of the Catalog will be further expanded.