Cisco solution accelerates Siebel 7.7 CRM applications and scales the deployment for 7000 agents across global WAN.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As telecommunications service providers race to take advantage of a global market, they must also compete effectively to gain and retain a healthy subscriber base especially during recent economic downturns. Customer care represents a vital ingredient for success in any telecom market, and particularly for companies competing for market share in the diverse European metropolitan areas. A leading fixed and mobile communications carrier recently upgraded its enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) platform to help ensure a successful alignment of this critical application with their goals for extending business into other European and global markets. This upgrade represented a major challenge for the telecom provider since the enterprise platform was extensively relied on to support the company's base of more than 20 million subscribers.
Unlike the previously deployed Siebel 2000 CRM platform, Siebel 7.7 employs Web-based services within a very distributed architecture that must be directed across Web front-end and application servers. The integrated software-only solution for scaling the application was running on the same servers as the application, overburdening the servers, and slowing user requests. This type of scalability solution could not provide the telecom company with the performance required for its 7000 customer agents supporting millions of customers. The IT application team recognized the need for an external solution to provide both high availability and scalability to the application. They set out to evaluate and select the best possible solution for the company's environment. The requirements for meeting this challenge, and thereby helping to ensure the success of the CRM platform upgrade, included:
• Flexible solution design, suitable to next-generation data center requirements
• Hardware certified with Siebel 7.7
• Ability to efficiently utilize all server resources, minimizing the number required today and accommodating future growth
• Built-in redundancy at multiple levels for business continuity
• Ease of management
• Integrated security features that do not negatively affect performance
CISCO FOR APPLICATIONS SOLUTION
Cisco and Siebel have worked together for many years to offer joint solutions including support and certification of the CSS product for the latest Siebel 7.7 applications. This partnership was an important factor in the telecom provider's decision to choose Cisco, since the certification of the Cisco platforms with the new Siebel release required an efficient and fast response by both vendors.
The specific Cisco for Applications/Siebel solution selected-the Cisco 11506 CSS-minimizes the number of servers required to host the modularized Siebel applications within the company's data center. Since the number of Web-based application modules has increased substantially for this and other next-generation enterprise applications, the Cisco CSS is a vital component achieving a successful Siebel 7.7 deployment.
"The current generation of enterprise applications puts a whole new set of requirements on the data center. The Cisco for Applications platform minimizes the effort required to deploy these complex Web-based applications and helps ensure that companies get excellent returns on their investments in terms of total cost of ownership and maximized performance for global users."
-Doug Gourlay, Senior Director, Data Center Solutions Marketing, Cisco Systems
The telecom provider selected the Cisco CSS for its modularity and flexibility. Interchangeable modules provide greater flexibility for supporting migration to Siebel 7.7. In addition to the modularity, the Cisco for Applications/Siebel solution gave the telecom provider:
• High availability - The Cisco CSS supports two levels of protection for servers and the Cisco CSS devices. For servers, the Cisco CSS performs simple health checks (keep-alives) and tests such as ping checks and TCP port open/close checks. For content switch availability, the devices support Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol to detect and recover quickly from problems. Session protection capabilities are also provided through Adaptive Session Redundancy.
• Ease of management - Cisco Content Switches offer several management interfaces to ease monitoring and administration requirements. These include System Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support, support for remote monitoring (RMON), the choice of an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) or a fast command-line interface (CLI), and configuration control using extensible markup language (XML).
• Security - Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology has been implemented in the Cisco CSS to provide both built-in security and efficient performance, off-loading the SSL processing from the application servers. The Cisco optimizations include SSL Persistence and SSL acceleration to enhance performance in the data center.
Other features of the Cisco CSS that enhanced this upgrade to Siebel 7.7 include:
• Load balancing using static algorithms
• Load balancing using dynamic algorithms
• Client stickiness (session persistence)
• Integrated SSL off-load
• Integrated compression
• Server and application verification (advanced keep-alives)
• High availability (interface and box redundancy)
• Flexible platform and protocol support (static and dynamic content)
• Management and monitoring tools (GUI, SNMP, RMON, XML, CLI)
BUSINESS RESULTS
Cisco for Applications/Siebel helps ensure that productivity can be maximized by off-loading the SSL and compression tasks from the Siebel application servers. This improves response times for user requests, and provides LAN-like performance over the WAN. Simultaneously, compressing the traffic minimizes the consumed bandwidth, which lowers total cost of ownership for the Siebel applications deployment. "The current generation of enterprise applications puts a whole new set of requirements on the data center," says Doug Gourlay, senior director of data center solutions marketing at Cisco. "The Cisco for Applications platform minimizes the effort required to deploy these complex Web-based applications and helps ensure that companies get excellent returns on their investments in terms of total cost of ownership and maximized performance for global users."
The application optimization and server off-loading have resulted in a very satisfied and productive customer management team. In addition, Cisco for Applications/Siebel gives the telecom provider:
• Optimized resource utilization - The existing servers and infrastructure are able to support the new Siebel 7.7 CRM solutions and give them room to grow.
• Scalable, nondisruptive architecture - The external load-balancing solution for the Web servers allows the provider to add or remove devices as needed without disrupting user services for the Siebel CRM applications.
• Low TCO - Already experienced with Cisco platforms, the telecom provider's IT team quickly gained familiarity with the Cisco for Applications/Siebel platform. Since they were already a Cisco networking customer, the solution was also easy to integrate into the data center and management processes and gave the provider one vendor relationship for collaborative planning and support projects.
