Tata Sky : Managing Growth

Tata Sky, a joint venture of STAR and one of the three DTH players in India,
started operations in 2004. The company has been witnessing explosive growth
over the last year, and keeping pace with that growth was becoming a challenge.
Customer demands and expectations were increasing at the same time. There were
issues like customers moving from one package to another with demands for more
channels. It wanted a phased approach to build its IT infrastructure with a
prime focus on critical business process. Though Tata Sky already had an
effective IT infrastructure in place, the only problem was that of properly
integrating it. The lack of proper integration directly impacted customer
service and created a hurdle in responding to market demands in the light of
increasing competition.

This was when Tata Sky decided to take help of the SOA technology. Talking
about the need for a new approach, Chakrapani Perangur, CIO, Tata Sky, says, We
wanted to put in place dynamics of service demands identical to what happens in
telecom, and deliver services instantaneously over multiple media.

He was very clear about the reason for choosing a new technology to manage
the complexities of growth. Chakrapani Perangur, elaborating on this, says, It
is very important that the technologies we choose are scalable from the
perspective of volumes, as in the number of new customers that we can anticipate
and from the point of view of transactions. Apart from scalability, it was
flexibility, which played an important part in Tata Skys opting for the SOA
platform. It felt the need to integrate multiple applications together to meet
the demands of customersboth internal and external.

Talking about taking the service-oriented approach instead of an
application-oriented approach, Perangur says, To meet all these demands, we
started evaluating various options available in the market, and we were fairly
sure that unless we have a service-oriented approach and not
application-oriented approach, we did not want to go for the solutions that have
been traditionally deployed.

Tata Sky chose IBMs WebSphere SOA, which has the capability of migrating the
existing applications into services, to create a computing architecture meant to
easily manage the growth of business apart from meeting customers requirements.
The solution suite was keeping with the emerging needs of the future. Tata Sky
managed to model its business process with the help of IBM WebSphere Business
Modeler. This also ensured that these processes were deployed, monitored and
initiated to meet key performance indicators. The other component of the
solution suite was IBM WebSphere Process Server (IBM WPS), a type of performance
engine. The IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus helped connect various
applications of Tata. Finally it was the IBM WebSphere Portal, which helped
create a rich user experience and the IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager
for ensuring applications performance and availability.

The implementation of the solution resulted in Tata Skys increased ability
to respond to customer service demands. For example, some of the service
provisioning issues like changing customers package, increasing the number of
channels for customers became seamlessly quick. Just an SMS from the customer
was all that was needed. Self-service portals also took the load off customer
care as customers started troubleshooting themselves.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in