Telco chooses Cisco for Applications/Siebel for high availability and more than doubling the user capacity of its global CRM solution.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As competition continues to grow in the telecommunications market, service providers must achieve high standards for every aspect of the customer experience. Enterprise applications such as Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have become vital tools for achieving excellent ratings from business and residential customers.
One Fortune 500 telco service provider was experiencing growth at a rate that threatened to overwhelm its CRM platform. To help ensure adequate performance-and maintain its award-winning level of customer service-the company initiated an upgrade to Siebel CRM 7.8.2 and Siebel Universal Customer Master (UCM). Also planned for inclusion in the new deployment were Siebel System Management, the CallCenter Component, Assignment Management, Workflow Management, Enterprise Application Integration, and Siebel Web Server Extensions for IIS. A final component-a Genesys G-plus adapter-was included for computer telephony integration (CTI).
This upgrade alone was not sufficient to meet the challenges presented by the company's growth. An efficient deployment, with the capacity to support the projected numbers of users, would require an optimal configuration of servers with the load spread across them to ensure high availability and scalability of the applications. The software load-balancing functionality built into the Siebel solutions would not be adequate for the scale of the planned deployment. As a further challenge, this particular telco company operated two data centers, and the corporate CRM solutions would be deployed across both locations. The company set out to find a high availability and scalability solution that could:
• Scale for future growth
• Accommodate the distributed deployment
• Provide high-availability functionality for the entire solution including both Siebel and CTI solutions
NETWORK SOLUTION
This particular telco provider was very experienced with scaling applications, having deployed Cisco for Applications solutions including approximately 160 Cisco®Content Services Switches (CSS) for other applications. The proven performance and flexibility of the Cisco platform gave the company the confidence that it required for this mission-critical deployment. In particular, the CRM application team chose Cisco for Applications/Siebel including the Cisco CSS for its:
• Scalable application transaction performance - An integrated, high-capacity Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) module allows off-loading SSL to improve the overall performance of the Web and application servers, enabling better application performance.
• Optimized application response times - The Cisco CSS provides a high-capacity Web application (Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP) compression module that improves application response times by 20 to 50 percent. This feature also off-loads compression from the server, which reduces server workload and decreases required WAN bandwidth thereby further lowering cost.
• Flexibility - More than any other content switch in its class, the Cisco CSS allows customizing combinations of ports, performance, and services.
• Availability and application integrity - The industry-standard Adaptive Session Redundancy capability supports stateful failover.
"Today's large-scale enterprise applications-such as Siebel CRM solutions-can no longer operate efficiently with only software-based load balancing. As applications have evolved to distributed service-oriented architectures, external high availability and scalability solutions such as Cisco for Applications/Siebel have become vital to the efficient utilization of server resources and reliable, uninterrupted operation."
-Doug Silverstein, Alliance Manager Cisco Systems
The deployment of Cisco for Applications/Siebel helps ensure that productivity can be maximized by improving the overall CRM application response times. Simultaneously, the Cisco solution compressed traffic, minimizing the consumed bandwidth and lowering total cost of ownership for the CRM deployment.
The CRM platforms were deployed in two data centers using a three-tier application architecture model (a Web tier, an application tier, and a database tier). A pair of redundant active-passive Cisco 11500 Series CSSs were deployed in front of the Web and application tiers within each of the two data centers, for a total of eight units. Separating the tiers is a Cisco for Applications/firewall solution. An additional unit was deployed in the test environment.
The strength of the Cisco CSS 11500 Series gave the telco provider an architecture that exceeded their scaling requirements. The modular design of the CSS protects the customer's investment by easily enabling upgrades of performance, ports, and services to meet future application demands. If more application throughput is needed in the future, additional units can be easily added to the deployment. The Cisco team also included in the solution a CSS methodology for support of the Genesys product, a significant add-on for the Siebel application.
BUSINESS RESULTS
The CRM platform is critical to the expanding telco company's business. The acceleration of the Siebel application greatly affects customer interactions, and is therefore vital to the company's bottom line. "Today's large-scale enterprise applications-such as Siebel CRM solutions-can no longer operate efficiently with only software-based load balancing," says Doug Silverstein, alliance manager at Cisco Systems. "As applications have evolved to distributed service-oriented architectures, external highly available and scalable solutions such as Cisco for Applications/Siebel have become vital to the efficient utilization of server resources and reliable, uninterrupted operation."
This new deployment provides several benefits:
• Expansion of CRM to match company growth - Load test measurements showed that Cisco for Applications/Siebel allows the telco to support far more than the required 2600 concurrent CRM users (as compared to the 1200 users supported with the previous CRM platform).
• Future-proof functionality - The CSS has been a leading product in the application delivery and acceleration market for many years, evenly distributing load across all servers, and redirecting traffic in the event of any server failures. Acquiring certification of the Cisco CSS with Siebel 7.7 further underscored the Cisco commitment and assured the customer of the effective working relationships between Cisco and Siebel.
• Cost-effective supportable solution - Already an experienced Cisco CSS user, this telco quickly gained proficiency on the new deployment. The automatic scaling to meet application load requires minimal support efforts going forward, with the ability to add servers and Cisco CSSs as needed without disruption to the overall CRM solution and its users. These attributes, combined with the efficient use of network and server resources, gave them a solution with the lowest possible total cost of ownership.
