OVERVIEW COMPANY Network Service Delivery (NSD) division, Sprint Dallas, Texas BUSINESS EXPERTISE Providing telecom services APPLICATION Customer Information System Extension (CISX(tm)) PLATFORMS HP 9000, Windows 3.1, Smalltalk BUSINESS CHALLENGE Capturing order information as close to the customer and point-of-sale as possible, to provide actual services sooner. VERSANT SOLUTION Three-tier distributed architecture

Because Sprint has a mobile sales force selling its business services, the proposed solution was based on capturing the order information as close to the customer and the point-of-sale as possible. In addition, the goal was to ensure valid service configuration, reducing errors, eliminating paper forms, and greatly speeding the provisioning of actual services. The IS organization saw an opportunity to radically affect Sprint's bottom line.

The first approach, started approximately three years ago, gave all field sales staff laptop PCs. This approach was basically a graphical front-end on the existing mainframe system. "We decided to get rid of the screen scraping and have an order added right into our corporate database," said Michael Rapken, director of customer acquisition and management systems for NSD. "Our feeling was that OO technology made a lot of sense. Sprint is frequently on the bleeding edge of technology. We are not afraid to take risks with emerging technologies if it means a competitive edge." Thus, the Customer Information System Extension (CISX) was born.

Development was done on OS/2 and initial pilot deployment was to 14 sales reps in late 1994. The architecture was three-tier and the object model was designed from scratch. In order to help with the analysis and design, the Sprint team supplemented their ranks with object mentors from ObjectSpace. ObjectSpace contributed valuable expertise in object analysis, object modeling, and database administration. The team used a modified version of Hewlett-Packard's Fusion methodology and adopted Smalltalk as its key implementation vehicle.

Hector Martinez, director of business and technology architecture for NSD, said, "We were not encumbered in any way by the fact that we ultimately needed to get the order information into the mainframe. We wanted to keep the object model representative of the way business was done."

WHY USE AN ODBMS

As the team began looking at the implementation issues, the choice of using an established relational database management system (RDBMS) or a less-proven object database management system became a key decision point. Sprint weighed the difficulty and complexity of decomposing the complex objects representing the order process and product catalog and decided to move to the realm of object end-to-end.

"The object storage provides a number of key benefits," said Martinez about this decision. "Once Sprint committed to the object methodologies, the use of an object storage mechanism made perfect business sense. We could directly store these object models and take advantage of object characteristics like inheritance, giving us a large amount of reusable objects."

Besides reducing development time by eliminating any translation code, new services and processes can be coded quickly from smaller component objects and by utilizing previous versions of similar services. Sprint quickly moved to choose an object database and decided upon the Versant ODBMS.

WHY CHOOSE VERSANT

There were two primary reasons behind the choice of Versant. First, Versant provided the high performance Sprint required coupled with the reliability necessary to be a key part of Sprint's data management infrastructure. Second, Versant provides a fully distributed database, allowing objects to be located anywhere on Sprint's internal networks. For Sprint, this means that applications written to a local database can be later dispersed throughout the organization.

In addition, only Versant supports the notion of a personal database. Since Sprint was eager to build a distributed mobile system, the fact that Versant could offer a personal subset of the central database on a given laptop means that complex operations could be performed on the laptop and then gracefully transmitted to the mainframe databases. "Versant provided advanced workgroup capabilities like check-in/check-out and personal databases that allowed Sprint to take advantage of the processing power available on the field-issued laptops," said Graham Glass, president of ObjectSpace. "Because of its capabilities, Sprint did not need to compromise in its adoption of a three-tier architecture for its overall implementation."

Finally, Versant provides robust and high performance support of the Smalltalk language. NSD knew that the benefits of the object modeling had to extend to the deployment platforms - a system that did not perform would not be acceptable to the sales and marketing organizations. The CISX application model was built in conjunction with a bill of materials of Sprint's telecom products, called the All Product Source, also implemented atop Versant. The high performance of the Versant ODBMS allows the sophisticated processing to occur without constant communication with the on-line central databases.

"We knew that using an object database put us ahead of the mainstream," said Rapken. "But we couldn't get to the business benefits we described without moving to Versant. Sprint is moving toward real-time service activation across the entire distributed Sprint network and Versant provides the performance and reliability necessary for our complex systems."

PROJECT ISSUES

Pilot deployment of CISX began during the third quarter of 1994 when 14 sales representatives were outfitted with OS/2 laptops. By the second quarter of 1995, feedback from the pilot had been integrated into project plans, and based on the positive responses, preparations for the large-scale rollout began. Production deployment is currently underway to more than 300 users by early 1996.

Because of the use of Versant, Sprint was able to adopt a distributed processing architecture, taking advantage of processing power at each level of the architecture. Sprint maintains the back-end mainframe which continues to support customer information and billing. The other system, built around Versant, supports the customer contact applications as well as peer-to-peer communication between the processes that access the mainframe data stores. For example, because Versant supports TCP/IP for communications, Sprint could adopt standard middleware products to connect the OS/2 servers running Versant with the IBM mainframes.

Another key issue for Sprint was the development of appropriate levels of internal object expertise. The organization is committed to object technology and recognized the need for mentoring and skills transfers. "Our general philosophy in Dallas is that as we enter areas of emerging technologies, we want to grow our own people," said Rapken. "We send people to training and we use senior mentors working directly with our people on the job." In the end, not only did this facilitate project deployment, but Sprint's investment in people is allowing the firm to take advantage of object technology and Versant in other projects.

CONCLUSION AND BUSINESS IMPACT

The business benefits of the CISX project are wide-ranging. In reengineering its order entry processes, Sprint is now able to process orders in minutes or hours rather than the days it took under the old system. Finally, the system allows sales reps to store partial orders and multiple versions of orders, providing a more flexible work environment for their field organization. The time savings coupled with the additional flexibility provided by the new system easily justified the investment in laptops for the sales team.

For the Sprint team, Versant provided key functionality unavailable in other commercial off-the-shelf offerings. The combination of its support for the object development model coupled with its strong data management capabilities is providing Sprint with competitive advantage as it strives to compete into the future.