Development of the World’s First SDC Solution for Telecom

Highlights

Driving Innovation for Telecom Industry: created a key component of the world’s first Software-Defined Connectivity (SDC) solution – a converged, cloud-native, global connectivity service with inherent billing that is fully designed and built for IoT services.
$37M in Series B Funding: Our client successfully raised $37 million in Series B funding, with backing from prominent investors such as Intel Capital, 83North, ARIE Capital Group, Dell Technologies Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Saban.
3x Performance Boost for SMS Request Time: managed to reduce SMS request time from 90ms to 30ms, in an industry where 1-2ms event reaction optimization can be game-changing for a company.
Achieving 30% Project Completion in 3 Months: Successfully completed 30% of the project within just 3 months, despite a demanding timeline and additional requirements. Our team swiftly adapted to a new domain, maintained high performance, and put in the extra effort when necessary to meet the critical deadline.

Client

Our client, the Israeli telecom technology vendor BD Innovations, was acquired by the UK-based innovative connectivity provider floLIVE in 2019. Before the acquisition by floLIVE, SPD Technology had been engaged in developing BD Innovations’ Business Support System (BSS) platform for Telecom operators. The new owner got to know our team working on this project and decided to continue the collaboration to evolve the system according to their vision.

floLIVE’s core business is a cloud-based connectivity enablement platform, specifically designed for IoT Software-as-a-Service providers across various market verticals. The company’s estimated annual revenue is currently $58.3 million per year, and it continues to grow.

Website:

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Country

Industry

Telecommunications

Team Size:

21+

Product

The product is the Rater Engine, one of the modules in floLIVE’s customer-centric ecosystem. This is an advanced service cost calculation and billing system for the client’s customers in its third iteration. Our team developed this product completely from scratch, and it joined a list of the full suite of floLIVE’s IoT connectivity solutions for businesses, including:

IoT Connectivity Platform
Cloud-managed Mobile Private Network (LTE/5G)
Global IoT Network as-a-service (LTE/5G)
A Cloud-based BSS built for IoT.

Goals and objectives

Improve Customer Experience and Satisfaction: developing a powerful custom system able to operate with close-to-instant speed of response and withstand high loads, ultimately improving the overall functionality and convenience of the platform.
Integrate Rater Engine 3.0: seamlessly integrating the newly developed billing system into the client’s processes without any significant disruptions, proactively offering suggestions in technical aspects and technology stack.

Project challenge

Understanding the IoT and Telecom Domain: keep up with rapidly evolving technologies, standards, and regulatory requirements, as well as closely collaborate with client’s in-house experts to understand specific needs, data flow, and network architecture.
Performance Optimization: build a system that is capable of processing vast amounts of real-time data with minimal latency, while maintaining high reliability and scalability.
9-Month Deadline: conduct meticulous planning, resource allocation, and risk management to deliver a complex solution within a tight timeframe.

Solution

For this project, we assembled a team of 20 dedicated experts, which include:

3 Team Leads/Software Architects
2 Front-end developers
3 Back-end Tech Leads
10 Back-end developers
1 DevOps
1 QA Automation Expert.

Our team had extensive experience in finance and eCommerce projects, but the telecom domain was entirely new to us. We held numerous informal discussion sessions with the client’s Solution Architect, who provided us with crucial under-the-hood insights. These sessions gave us a comprehensive understanding of both the new domain and the specific project.

After a thorough analysis of the client’s system, we decided to build Rater Engine 3.0, a modern billing solution consisting of a previously existing BBS system combined with additional cutting-edge functionality according to the latest technological standards. While the tech stack for the project was initially defined by the client, our experts proactively proposed more optimal technologies including Kotlin, Kafka, PostgreSQL, and Spring Framework, all of which have proven to be excellent choices.

Writing code and implementing features was not a challenge for our experienced team; however, raising the app’s performance to the highest standards was. The early version of our system, developed from scratch without any caching, could handle only 200 requests per second. This performance was insufficient, so our team switched to Apache Ignite, an in-memory data grid, which boosted our capacity to 2,300 requests per second.

After some discussions with the client, we insisted that there was still a lot of room for performance improvement and proposed implementing Hazelcast. It gave us more than a 2x boost to performance, with 5000+ requests per second, without scaling or any additional actions.

We tested the system on databases with over 1 million users and were completely satisfied with the results. Sometimes, we had to do refactoring and rewrite certain modules of the system to adjust to the changing requirements and new functionality. Thus, we don’t have legacy code with this app, as we are constantly improving the current one.

Tech Stack

Kotlin
Spring
Gradle
PostgreSQL
Hazelcast
Kafka
Elastic Search

Our results

We met all project objectives by the deadline, impressing the client with our strong work ethic and proactive problem-solving approach.

Launching Rater Engine 3.0: delivered a new and improved version of the client’s billing system for customers, developed entirely from scratch, and outperformed dramatically all previous solutions in terms of operating efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Increasing the Customer Base: the number of floLIVE’s B2B clients using the company’s connectivity platform has been steadily growing. Recently, the platform has started being used as a white-label product by a major Western ICT provider.
Taking on the Next Challenges: we continued our collaboration with floLIVE, as our partner trusted us with more new and exciting projects including device management, the new and improved customer management system, and software for 5G and IoT modules.

Our dedicated team now oversees changes across the entire floLIVE platform. Upcoming development initiatives include scaling the platform, migrating it fully to the cloud, and implementing a microservices architecture for Rater Engine 3.0.