Richard Caplin

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Business Problem

Cityplay had provided IP-based fixed voice telephony services using a VOIP telephone switch for many years. The supplier of the equipment announced quite suddenly that it would declare the switch product as End Of Life and that support would be discontinued after 18 months. Cityplay was unwilling to use an unsupported telephone switch at the heart of it’s network and so the decision was taken to launch a project to evaluate, purchase and implement a new VOIP telephone switch.

Key Considerations

Some of the key considerations in selecting the new switch are shown below:

Project Scope

 As Technical Director, Richard Caplin led the project from start to finish. This included building the business case for approval by shareholders in order to obtain initial approval to proceed with the project and regular project reviews.

 The project divided into several clearly defined phases :

• Evaluation
• Selection & negotiation
• Installation
• Systems Integration
• Commissioning and acceptance
• Homologation
• CPE testing
• Migration of residential subscribers
• Migration of business subscribers
• Task Assignments

External consultants were employed to assist with creating the requirements document and Request for Proposals (RFP) and with initial evaluations. Shortlisting, final selection and negotiation were performed by Cityplay. Installation and initial setup was undertaken by the supplier. All other implementation phases of the project were undertaken by staff from the Cityplay assisted by the supplier
OutcomeDespite a number of challenges, such as 

• temporary migration configuration had to be changed from that planned
• the CPE certification was more difficult than expected
• the automated provisioning system taking longer than expected to develop

the switch was put into production with no loss of service to any subscribers and with the result that the desired service improvements were achieved.

Managing and problem solving to deliver hi-tech communications services to residential mass-market customers and to highly individual business clients.

 Career overview

I have spent 30 years in senior management roles for complex hi-tech businesses. I joined my first Cable TV company in 1985 with the first wave of telecomms liberalisation in the UK and have since been riding the technology rollercoaster as Cable Television evolved into Cable Communications. Service offerings  improved from the original multichannel TV service, adding first telephony, then internet and now mobile phone services. Alongside this has gone the change in network technologies from coaxial and copper through HFC to Fibre the Home (FttH) and the change from analogue to digital and IP-based methods of transmission.

I have had roles as

• Director of MIS (selecting, implementing and managing billing, call rating, CRM and OSS systems),
• Director of Engineering (selecting, implementing and managing head-end systems, Conditional Access Systems, digital and VOIP telephony switches, HFC and FTTH network rollout)
• Operations Consultant (Business Planning, M&A due diligence, business process assistance, product development, margin analysis)
• Systems Sales (Sales of BSS, OSS, CRM and associated systems to customers in EMEA and worldwide)

International Experience

Having started in the UK, my experience led to me being invited to undertake long term consultancy roles in the Middle East, Bermuda and most recently in France. As a Sales Manager for an Integrated BSS/OSS supplier I worked worldwide.

Professional membership

 Business Problem

France Citevision's business plan called for significant growth in subscriber numbers. This could only be achieved through geographic expansion away from its core network in Amiens, France. It had to offer its' services over networks in other cities where the networks were owned and operated by different companies . This required :

1. Creation and management of new products localised for these different geographic areas
2. Automatic creation of a Service Provisioning Request immediately after creation of the customer order in SmartPack  
3. Automatic creation of a Provisioning Request File using different formats for each remote network operator
4. Updating the remote network operator's systems with Provisioning Requests
5. Accepting and managing automated feedback and Provisioning Status updates
6. Creation of a tracking and management system to support follow-up processes and procedures

Limited budgets and short timescales ruled out migration and implementation of new CRM, Billing and OSS systems.

Solution

The solution that was developed had to employ inexpensive, readily available tools and make use of the existing systems and to accomplish the necessary tasks, albeit that these systems had not been developed with this kind of integration in mind.

A fully automated solution was created using the innate capabilities of Amdocs' SmartPack and the underlying Oracle database for the Customer and product management. The process management and automation layer was implemented using an open source ETL tool (Pentaho Data Integration or PDI) which captured changes of state, took appropriate actions and managed automation, reporting and integration with external systems.

PDI was chosen for its ease of implementation, its flexibility and its diverse capabilities which ensured that a single core could be developed that would interface to a wide variety of third-party systems whether file-based or using WebService interactions.

Results

The solution was developed in a Windows-based test environment and, following debugging and refinement of processes, it was migrated to a dedicated linux server where the various processes ran continuously to completely automate the new inter-operator interactions. The new tables created as part of the project became the basis for management reporting for follow-up and operational troubleshooting.