Enterprise PHP brings online customer experience under control for Cable & Wireless Worldwide

By working with Ibuildings, the UK's enterprise PHP specialists, Cable & Wireless Worldwide has improved customer experience by smoothly integrating and migrating functionality from disparate IT systems to create a highly responsive and uniform customer portal.

Integrating 46 systems aids better customer experience

For Cable & Wireless, a series of bold acquisitions, one of the most recent being THUS, has created an infrastructure of 46 disparate and complex IT systems.

While the company's customers had access to critical information online, there was a need for a single, intuitive, simple and easy-to-use portal to remove the need to log onto multiple systems to report faults, manage accounts and communicate with the company. Customers and internal users were calling in to register queries and faults rather than using the online systems. Operators were dealing with routine fault logging calls which could have been logged online; it was clear that if this situation were to continue, the costs of servicing enquiries would also increase.

The existing systems were in danger of becoming hard to use, and the long time taken to make changes to them also threatened to cause operational problems for Cable & Wireless' day to day business. Cable & Wireless' IT team wanted to focus their energies on strategic IT decisions to improve the company’s business systems; instead, they were presented with a future based around continuously fire-fighting the challenges presented by the existing IT estate.

On taking over THUS, Cable & Wireless inherited an Online Portal Team of two engineers who had already spent six months developing a PHP based portal user interface called My CW. However, the scale, complexity and timescales of integrating 46 IT systems to feed into the portal were overstretching the team.

Key requirements for the creation of a unified web experience

Cable & Wireless' main aims were to create consistent web applications, lower update costs and reduce development time. The highest priority was capturing data from existing IT systems, including provisioning, ticketing, reporting and document management, and presenting it via the newly developed portal interface. To simplify user experience, Cable & Wireless also required a single sign-on system.

The Portals Team decided that they required both additional technical expertise and a technology that allowed fast and agile development, was suitable for a large enterprise, cost effective, robust, web-based and worked well with a wide range of IT systems.

Open source PHP for large and complex enterprise web integrations

The Portals Team had used PHP to build a cutting edge dashboard for My CW, so PHP was the natural choice to knit together the disparate IT systems that would populate the portal.

Ian Barber, Technical Lead on Ibuildings’ Cable & Wireless project, on some of the advantages of PHP: "PHP is the only language built for the web. Much of the necessary code, up to 80%, is already available for a given project, and can be reused easily. Critically, for a large scale project, there are also no licensing fees associated with PHP which brings significant cost savings."

Craig Penfold, Head of Cross Product and Portals, Cable & Wireless commented on his decision to work with Ibuildings: "Cable & Wireless needed PHP experts with experience of large-scale enterprise integration projects and selected Ibuildings due to their proven capability and successful track record in this area. Their team migrated functionality from multiple systems quickly and allowed us to replace and where appropriate, rebuild any legacy systems into faster, lighter and more web-specific systems."

Common functionality across web applications

To meet Cable & Wireless' immediate requirements, Ibuildings built a Service API layer which consolidated and connected the key IT systems needed to link into My CW.

The Service API allowed the reuse of a set of common functions that were implemented only once into the service layer, and then reused by individual IT systems, applications and websites. It also integrated third party applications in a consistent and robust manner, and helped workaround their performance limitations.

The migration to a Service API started with a functional analysis of the API’s goals. Following this, a technical design was created to define the Service API’s architecture. Finally, the API was developed and tested.

In addition to the Service API, Ibuildings used PHP to quickly build a scalable single sign-on system to avoid the need for multiple passwords.

One portal, one sign-on

Within three months of selecting Ibuildings, Cable & Wireless has a fully functioning portal which integrates the key IT systems necessary to service its customers quickly and efficiently.

The new portal soft launched in November 2009. The first users of the portal were the THUS team and customers, who can now communicate critical information such as major service disruptions in one place. No longer does a customer have to visit one site for fault logging and another for wholesale access. The portal has already dramatically cut the number of incidents logged via the telephone. Indeed, Cable & Wireless predicts that 1,500 contacts per week will use the website rather than call to log incidents.

Cable & Wireless now also has a very agile way of adding new services or making changes via the Service API. For instance, additional functionality, applications or user interfaces can be developed within 3 – 6 months. This represents a 66% time and cost saving over historical developments.

Jon Holloway, Head of Online Portals, Cable & Wireless: "Cable & Wireless has experienced a real uplift in portal usage, which is already providing a measurable ROI. The portal was soft launched to THUS customers and employees to pilot its effectiveness, and based on that success will be launched to all external customers in December 2009. The feedback has been that it’s a much more friendly process, and has increased the efficiency of incident logging enormously."

Craig Penfold, Head of Cross Product and Portals, added: "Ibuildings' professionalism, reliability, ability to deliver on time and within our commercial constraints makes their team vital to the success of our customer facing online systems. Ibuildings has brought together our complex systems through their technical know-how and complete understanding of our business requirements, and ultimately has improved our interactions with our customers which is of paramount importance to us."

Future plans

Following the success of My CW portal, Ibuildings is rolling out a SaaS portal with a Wholesale Access Delivery portal planned for the near future. Cable & Wireless and Ibuildings are now going through the process of migrating the remaining IT systems to the new Service API and PHP code base. Cable & Wireless is also considering the centralisation of authentication systems by extending the new single-sign-on system.