Telstra Network Inventory Management Application Data Migration with Celona Evolve Software

Celona Case Study

Telstra is Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company, with one of the best known brands in the country. Telstra offers a full range of services and competes in all telecommunications markets throughout Australia, providing more than 9.0 million Australian fixed line and 10.2 million mobile services, including 6.3 million 3G services.

Successful strategic Amdocs OSS migration in a highly complex and demanding environment gives Telstra single end-to-end inventory view.

01
Business Challenge
In common with most large Telecommunications service providers across the globe, Service Inventory Management had become a significant challenge for Telstra. Years of growth, expansion and acquisitions had left Telstra with multiple different applications to manage its IP/MPLS services, network and geographic data. As part of its determination to transform its business process to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century delivering world-class efficiency, customer experience and reduced operating costs, Telstra selected Cramer OSS (later acquired by Amdocs and now known as Amdocs OSS) as its strategic platform for network and service operations. The move to Amdocs OSS would allow business units such as Network Services, Network Construction and Front-of-House teams to find accurate inventory data in a fraction of the time the old systems allowed. Telstra is a large business with staff and partners distributed across a large territory over multiple time-zones winning and maintaining support and enthusiasm for both the journey and the outcome of the transformation programme was a big challenge. The business processes that depended on The Amdocs OSS Suite is the strategic application for Telstras logical inventory. A single end-to-end Inventory view and alignment for locating our entire infrastructure is essential for identifying and solving customer problems quickly, making plans for the future and ensuring upgrades and maintenance are carried out to schedule Data describing 675,395 elements listed for migration (Devices, Cards, Ports, Links, Circuits, Services & Overlying Objects) had to be migrated from more than a dozen source systems supporting different networks, logically sequenced and loaded into Amdocs OSS. Each of the source systems was vastly different, ranging from Legacy In-house developed applications based on various RDBMSs to Spreadsheets. There were many data quality issues with the source systems. No standard inventory management format with each application having its own naming, coding and formatting standards creating a significant number of data discrepancies. Large amounts of data duplication. The project wasnt a case of simply implementing a new system and copying data across. A large number of interdependent factors needed to be taken into consideration: the legacy source systems and that needed to be transferred to Amdocs OSS are mission-critical to Telstra and could not be switched off for even a few hours without causing major disruption to their operations. As with any large enterprise, and especially in the Telecoms sector, maintaining compliance throughout the transformation process was a major requirement regulators do not give dispensation while a company reconfigures its processes, systems and data.

02
Technical Challenge
The Amdocs OSS project was an incredibly complex deployment and was one of the largest initial releases ever undertaken at Telstra. The migration was the cornerstone of programme success and on the critical path to the overall success of the project.

 Source data was highly complex and interdependent including: Inventory of Geographical, Logical & Physical network elements. Inventory of customer services. Maintaining overall control and visibility for the very diverse and distributed stakeholder community over the migration and data cleanse process through many months. Both the source data (through discovery and data quality processes) and the target platform changed regularly throughout the programme. Migration Critical Success Criteria Ensure near-perfect data quality Data loaded into Amdocs OSS had to be highly accurate, strongly correlated and de-duplicated for operational processes to work. Loss of data would result in loss of service. Loss of service would impact customers an unacceptable outcome for Telstra. Selection of the best source data entities to use in many cases there were multiple choices of source entities or attributes, and the best choice varied between territories and product sets. Minimise business disruption With hunderds of business users accessing the systems 24x7, availability of the inventory data could not be disrupted. Delivery to defined timescales. Delivery to agreed budget. The biggest risk with a new system, new processes and new data on this scale was having an unsuccessful migration while testing will identify issues in individual components, ultimately end to end success cannot be measured until the solution is running live in the business. Accurate data is key to any successful delivery. Fastest time to complete migration A manually scripted transformation with business rules and logic was not possible Telstra estimated that traditional ETL/data integration solutions would have taken 2.5 years to achieve the migration, if it had been possible at all. Celona Evolves unique model-driven migration approach supported an incremental transfer of business processes and complex data models with many internal dependencies from the legacy data sources to target system. Highest quality data Telstra wanted to ensure the quality of the target data before it was loaded into Amdocs OSS. Celona Evolve was able to interface directly with the Amdocs OSS API (Application Programming Interface) to load the inventory data directly into the Amdocs OSS database. This enforced referential and business integrity as legacy network data was transformed, cleansed and transferred to create new inventory data. Error checking and trapping during testing was vital and built-in features in Celona Evolve helped easily identify discrepancies, perform root cause analysis and help track back to the source data. During and post migration, the project team needed to be able to respond quickly to data quality issues raised by Telstra business users in order to verify quality of outcome in the new system. Frequently, they needed to track data back to its origin in the source systems. Celona Evolves built-in audit trail created a clear Telstra had extensive experience using traditional ETL/data integration solutions and standard industry toolsets and knew using them on a complex project with multiple source/target migrations within a manageable timeframe presented challenges that could not be suitably addressed. Telstras strategic direction is to use world class suppliers with proven off-the-shelf solutions and with a clear understanding of the solutions available, Telstra selected Celona for the following reasons:

03
Choice of Celona

and business-friendly source of information about the journey each item took through the migration making it easy for the project team to relate issues back to the original data. This also provides an out-of-the-box answer to compliance questions around transformation. Telstra was impressed by Celona Evolves model-based approach which enables migrations to be driven from the source or target data model, whichever suits the project environment. At Telstra, the target model was chosen to drive modelling and this proved to be the right option. Amdocs OSS is a highly configurable application which is tailored to fit each target service providers needs through metadata. In this project the metadata would be delivered through a series of drops, sometimes weekly. Celonas modelling approach and use of the Amdocs-provided API created the flexibility required to absorb each set of changes and the required level of integrity of the resulting data load. Minimal downtime and business disruption To avoid any unnecessary downtime, Telstra wanted to successfully pre-migrate all data to Amdocs OSS, before switching the business users from the old systems to the new. Celonas sophisticated forward migration capability (achieved by a two phase commit process across each transaction to maintain integrity of the overall logical systems and databases) was able to ensure any transactions made by users on the old live systems were also made on the new Amdocs OSS application. Celonas reverse migration capability was not needed on the project, but was a clear selection criteria for use on future projects. Established domain expertise and track record Celonas roots are deeply planted in the Telecoms industry and Celona has extensive knowledge of OSS/BSS application migrations. Proven commercial application Telstra preferred to use commercial solutions to application data migration rather than internal project-based/bespoke approaches. Celona Evolve is the only application data migration platform that is available as a commercial solution. The troubleshooting process is made easy with Celonas migration audit trail and dataset lifecycle management. Its simple to verify back to original sources.

04
The Migration
Within 4 weeks of being engaged on the project, a four-member Celona team was able to prove the capability and approach used by Celona Evolve by demonstrating a single network data load into the target platform, Amdocs OSS, from two key source systems. Once proven, Celona joined project members from Telstra, Don River and Amdocs to form a team of 26 to complete the successful data migration and delivery of

Celona Evolve Migration Management Console

Amdocs OSS.

Working closely together using Celona Evolve, the team carried out the migration addressing the critical success criteria: Data Quality Data in the source systems needed profiling and discovery to remove discrepancies and establish the correct data, ensuring very high quality in the new system. The actual Data Cleaning was carried out before and during migration between the source systems and the target. Modelling the data within Celona Evolve enabled the team to implement new naming conventions which are being standardised across Telstra, streamlining processes and improving quality. Incremental Loading An incremental approach like this represents a significant challenge to most migration tools and techniques as they would normally require a complete rebuild of the scripting for each new data drop. Using Celona Evolve, the project team handled regular updates to the target configuration without disruption. Error Handling Built-in, business-friendly error handling resulted in a strong process being built around the team that created early visibility of errors and appropriate routing to the business expert best equipped to make decisions about how each issue should be handled. Synchronisation of source and target systems Forward sync features of Celona Evolve allowed source data to be profiled, cleaned and migrated to Amdocs OSS in line with the phased implementation, while ensuring all updates in the legacy system were synchronised with the data in Amdocs OSS. Speed The key to making progress in complex application migration is having the right combination of tools, people and migration method that yields control, stakeholder visibility and engagement and technical understanding of the target you are trying to hit. That combination was achieved in Telstra, and the results speak for themselves.

Celona Amdocs OSS migration solution for Telstra

05
Successful Migration Delivered
This migration project was never a case of simply implementing a new system and transferring data across. Data had to be removed from multiple source systems supporting multiple networks, cleaned, de-duped, logically sequenced and input into the new Amdocs OSS system. The results have dramatically simplified inventory processes. The Amdocs OSS application allows a single view of the network with feature rich information. Users previously had to toggle between up to six screens to obtain information, now its all done on the one screen. The processes are simplified and uniformed. Users in Western Australia have the same experience as those in Victoria. Migration Metrics Celona was an integral part of Telstras successful implementation of one of the worlds largest single initial deployments of Amdocs OSS and in the most complex domain of IP. Telstra strongly value the partnership we have built with Celona and see the decision to use Celona Evolve as a successful one our ability to deliver this challenging and complex solution was enhanced by the choice of Celona as a migration partner. We could not have had a more successful outcome with any other product. "Telstras vision is a simpler IT environment that involves partnering with world class suppliers using proven off-the-shelf solutions. With Celona Evolve, we utilised a data migration platform that provides minimal impact on our business operation while migrating data to our OSS Logical Inventory solution." About Celona Celona is the leading provider of Application Data Migration software specifically developed for organisations who are managing complex application data migrations driven by transformation, or who are upgrading their legacy systems and applications to optimise efficiency, customer focus and costs. Celona Evolve is the software platform of choice for organisations who want to remove data migration from the critical path, that require a businesscentric application data migration approach which lowers risks and costs with compliance, in the shortest timeframes. "The fact that the deployment was one of the largest of its kind, but also had a 99.9% data migration success rate, demonstrates the quality of the IT team that led this project."

Time The project lasted 14 months (with the last 6 months a live trial)
and met the business case time metrics.

Final migration took 11 days, 3 days ahead of schedule

(12-23 June 2009).

Resources 4 Celona staff as part of 26 project members from Telstra,

Don River and Amdocs.

Downtime Zero. Quality 99.995 % success rate for migrated data, where only 31
migration errors were not expected and could not be explained.

Cost The project completed within budgetary estimates and was

judged a successful delivery.

Scale 675,395 elements migrated from more than a dozen service

inventory management applications into a single Amdocs OSS application.

One of the largest initial releases ever undertaken at Telstra. One of the largest initial releases of Amdocs OSS worldwide.

Celona Technologies, 63 Gee Street, London EC1V 3RS, UK www.celona.com E: [email protected] T: +44 (0) 20 7566 9100 2010 Celona Technologies Ltd.
Changing the rules of Application Data Migration