Success Stories

BT Wholesale
Sales and Support Portal for Customers and Channel Partners

Abstract

BT Wholesale has built a comprehensive customer portal on BEA WebLogic Portal to enhance its sales and support capabilities and ensure a predictable user experience. In addition to improving customer satisfaction and making BT Wholesale more agile and responsive, the portal has delivered millions of dollars in quantifiable cost savings and paid for itself in only 15 months.

Overview

After a decade of evolution, BT Wholesale’s presence on the Internet had become a loose collection of 35 sales, support and marketing applications without a common infrastructure or consistent look and feel. BT felt it was important to establish a single electronic channel through which all online customer interaction could take place. This would reduce overhead and facilitate faster introductions of new products.

The first step in the effort to consolidate its 35 Internet applications was to deploy a robust, scalable platform that could support the breadth of BT Wholesale’s operation. After conducting tests on the available platforms, BT Wholesale selected BEA WebLogic Portal as its Web application infrastructure.

With the platform decision made, BT Wholesale migrated all of its Web applications onto a unified, simplified and extensible portal. Customers are now able to do all the following activities from a single, centralized Web site:

• Search product literature
• Confirm service availability
• Receive price quotes
• Submit, validate and provision orders
• Track order status
• Submit change orders and trouble tickets
• Find self-support information and resources
• View customized reports
• Access billing statements

More than 10,000 registered users are accessing the portal. The portal facilitates revenue creation totaling around £30m p.a., and the company expects that figure to grow tenfold as more business is moved to the Internet channel. On a typical day, the portal serves up more than 40,000 pages views.
An analysis of BT’s return on investment (ROI) from the portal project indicates that the company recouped its initial investment in approximately 15 months. By the end of Year 2, the ROI had reached 182 percent and cost savings attributable to the portal approached £6.7 million. The development of a robust Internet channel also enables business managers to exploit the same systems and applications repeatedly when introducing new products and services. The result is less design and implementation work for each new project, which enables faster deployments.

On a technical level, the infrastructure is dramatically simplifying application development and integration by allowing BT to reuse proven software code, leverage open standards to link applications rather than building custom connectors, and eliminate the duplication of effort created by 35 application silos that contained repetitive business functions (e.g., customer log in, user authentication, account history).

Customer Brief

BT Wholesale is part of the BT Group. It provides comprehensive network services and solutions within the U.K. Its customers include more than 500 communication companies, fixed and mobile network operators, and service providers, including BT Retail and BT Global Services. BT Wholesale brings in annual revenue of more than £4 billion. Over 300 million calls are made from BT Wholesale’s network each day, and 350 million Internet connections are made every month.

Business Process Challenge

After a decade of evolution, BT Wholesale’s presence on the Internet had become a loose collection of 35 sales, support and marketing applications without a common infrastructure or consistent look and feel. This created significant inefficiencies for both BT Wholesale employees and customers, and was costing the company greatly in terms of money, productivity and competitiveness.

BT felt it was important to establish a single electronic channel through which all online customer interaction could take place. By streamlining its Internet operations, BT Wholesale could cut overhead associated with Web development and maintenance, encourage greater use of the Web for customer self-service (which would lower support costs), facilitate faster introductions of new products, and foster greater customer loyalty by making BT an easier company with which to work.

This focus on the Web is part of a broader BT Group initiative known as Netcentricity. The initiative is aimed at changing the culture of BT; transforming the company into a more creative and Internet-savvy organization that takes a fresh approach to addressing business challenges.

“The Net is the ultimate business tool for improving customer service, shortening sales cycles, simplifying workflows, and accelerating the rollout of new products,” said Julian Stobbs, Head of e-business at BT Wholesale. “Although more people turn to BT for Internet access than any other provider in the U.K., we can do more internally to make ourselves a true Internet company. Whenever challenges arise, we must look for ways to leverage the inherent ubiquity and scalability of the Web for solutions.”

Solution

The first step in the effort to consolidate its 35 Internet applications was to deploy a robust, scalable platform that could support the breadth of BT Wholesale’s operation. The company then conducted an ITT of platforms from industry leading companies. After conducting tests on the platforms and researching each solution, BT Wholesale selected BEA WebLogic Portal as its Web application infrastructure.

“After reviewing our options, it became clear that WebLogic Portal was the best platform for us,” said Julian. “It would allow us to start modestly and scale as needed. Its aggressive support for open standards would maximize flexibility for the business. And its ease of integration would speed time to value from our development projects, and allow us to simply ‘plug in’ newly acquired applications and technologies.”

With the platform decision made, BT Wholesale migrated all of its Web applications onto a unified, simplified and extensible portal. Customers are now able to do all the following activities from a single, centralized Web site:

• Search product literature
• Confirm service availability
• Receive price quotes
• Submit, validate and provision orders
• Track order status
• Submit change orders and trouble tickets
• Find self-support information and resources
• View customized reports
• Access billing statements

Julian added, “In addition to enhancing the service we provide to our direct customers, our new portal allows us to establish deeper levels of integration with our resellers. We are able to quickly and easily create modified, private-label versions of the portal that enable resellers to more cost-effectively support their end users. That’s a significant value add that makes us a very attractive wholesaler to many service providers. We’re relieving them of substantial personnel and technical burdens.”

The portal utilizes an Interwoven content-management server and an Oracle 8i database system. The operating system is Sun Solaris. The portal runs on a cluster of four Sun Fire servers. The portal is integrated with BT Wholesale’s back office via BEA WebLogic Integration, which provides business process management (BPM) to ensure timely message delivery, confirmation of delivery, and reliable workflow execution.

Results

More than 10,000 registered users from BT Wholesale’s 500 customers are using the portal. The portal facilitates revenue creation totaling around £30m p.a., and the company expects that figure to grow tenfold as more business is moved to the Internet channel. On a typical day, the portal serves up more than 40,000 pages views.

“In a short time, the portal has become critically important to our business,” said Julian. “Transactions completed online cost us only a fraction of transactions that require human intervention. Sales cycles are shortened significantly, which improves cash flow. Every online customer interaction is conducted within a consistent, professional environment. And we can introduce new services or launch marketing promotions as fast as our business people can bring them to us. Our BEA-powered infrastructure is an enabler, not a limitation.”

An analysis of BT’s return on investment (ROI) from the portal project indicates that the company recouped its entire initial investment in only 1.27 years (approximately 15 months). By the end of Year 2, the ROI had reached 182 percent and cost savings attributable to the portal approached £6.7 million. The cost savings were generated by a reduction in software license expenses, hardware requirements, staffing levels and help-desk expenditures, as well as increased customer self-service and the automation of many marketing and customer-service functions.

The development of a robust Internet channel also enables business managers to exploit the same systems and applications repeatedly when introducing new products and services. The result is less design and implementation work for each new project, which enables faster deployments. Not only does such speed and flexibility provide an important competitive advantage, it also allows product teams to focus more time on adding value to a product and less time on the logistics of product delivery.

On a technical level, the infrastructure is dramatically simplifying application development and integration by allowing BT to reuse proven software code, leverage open standards to link applications rather than building custom connectors, and eliminate the duplication of effort created by 35 application silos that contained repetitive business functions (e.g., customer log in, user authentication, account history).

“In the portal’s first 15 months, we were able to publish 100 builds,” said Steve Wallis, Centre Manager for Corporate Portals at BT Wholesale. “That speaks volumes about the ease of doing business on the BEA platform. When we need to make a change, we just do it. We’ve cut development costs by about £1 million annually. BEA’s simplicity allows us to focus resources on business logic and service differentiation rather than on portal plumbing. I believe it makes us more opportunistic, responsive and competitive.”

Julian added, “Before we moved to BEA, costs had been spiralling and inefficiency had permeated our Web operation. That’s all changed now. We’re smarter, leaner and able to provide the online resources and user experience that make customers want to keep doing business with us. We anticipate that our BT Wholesale portal will be key in the months and years ahead to growing our customer base and expanding our revenue streams.”

About BEA
BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS) is the world’s leading application infrastructure software company, providing the enterprise software foundation for more than 15,000 customers around the world, including the majority of the Fortune Global 500. BEA and its WebLogic® brand are among the most trusted names in business.

Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., BEA has 77 offices in 31 countries and is on the Web at www.bea.com.