Verio
Verio, part of the NTT, is a global provider of hosting services. As part of their acquisition activities in Europe they have multiple country offices all using different billing and financial systems. They needed to rationalize these applications to allow central management, reporting and technical support. As with many rapid acquisition strategies the new acquired companies had stronger systems that the European headquarters.
Verio Europe already knew which systems they wanted to deploy but the project had not made much progress and required external consultants to drive the project, define the details and work with the country offices to get buy-in, to get trained, and to make it operationally.
Solution
The project had three main tasks: technical integration and deployment; buy-in and addressing the country requirements; the rollout and training.
Technical: A centralized Windows platform with clustered MSSQL and Web (IIS) servers. Communications between provisioning and billing systems built using generic SOAP concepts. The links between billing and the finance systems used proprietary software from the financial system's vendor. The biggest challenge was working with the billing software vendor to add Accounts Receivable functionality since the financial system did not have a deferred revenue model.
Buy-in: With multiple countries being integrated into a single system each country had unique requirements based on their legacy systems. Identifying critical items, addressing country legal requirements (TAX, privacy, archiving, etc.) all required modifications to the project. As with any change in process there is significant push back and constant engagement was required to maintain their buy-in.
Rollout: The applications were deployed on a rapid rollout schedule with each country being completed in a calendar month. Two teams were needed, one for the rollout and one to stay behind for the next month. This is in addition to a central support function. All of the countries were rolled out over the six month period.
Tags: MSSQL, MSSQL Server, SQL, IIS, IIS Server, billing system, finance system, integration, rollout, workflow