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Interactive Softworks Helps Tranzact Develop Sustainable Competitive Advantage

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Situation

Tranzact is a leading provider of end-to-end, technology-driven customer acquisition solutions for the financial services, media and telecommunications sectors. Specializing in large-scale, fully integrated customer acquisition solutions, the company works with clients to deliver qualified leads, fully provisioned sales and robust customer management systems. Every year, Tranzact acquires more than 250,000 new wireless customers, more than 300,000 new credit card customers and more than 500,000 new insurance policies for its clients—all while maintaining the systems and infrastructure to support 20 million annual satellite TV transactions.

Challenges

Tranzact works in a complex, high-volume and ever-changing transactional environment where each of its clients’ campaigns is not only vastly different, but also subject to daily change. Because of the nature of this environment Tranzact was faced with a number of unique and pressing operational challenges.

Among these challenges was the need to continually deploy these complex client campaigns and implement thousands of business-rule changes that had to be operational within weeks, not months. Furthermore, as new clients came on board and client requirements became more complicated, Tranzact’s infrastructure had to also handle the capacity fluctuations and anomalies that resulted from the deployment of new back-end services, such as banking and credit verification.

To address these issues, Tranzact’s innovative IT organization recognized that rewriting code was not an attractive solution from either a time-to-market or cost effectiveness perspective. Instead, it needed a way to evolve into a more flexible business environment through an architecture that would facilitate change.

Tranzact’s development team also needed a flexible architecture that would enable it to focus on implementing business rules without the architecture itself becoming another obstacle to overcome. It also needed a better method for identifying and repairing failures proactively, as well as a way to reduce operational costs by reducing network management complexity.

Solution

Recognizing the potential business benefits of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) long before the movement gained wide acceptance, Tranzact turned to Interactive Softworks, which provided the company with a flexible .NET architecture supported by a robust SOA framework. The solution was built on Interactive Softworks’ Metaphor™ platform—a standards-based SOA and Interaction Management platform, that provides the integration capabilities of an “enterprise service bus” while providing a powerful SOA development framework tuned to the needs of today’s complex enterprises.

Both foundational and traditional services were implemented using established best practices and toolkits. These services provided a rich foundation for rapidly constructing and tuning more complex business processes. These business processes were created and managed using Metaphor’s business process designer, a BPM toolset that provides a means for developers to implement processes, including interface and business rules, in exactly the same fashion that a business team thinks about them.

Results

Improved Infrastructure Performance

“The results have been remarkable,” said Washburn. “From an infrastructure performance standpoint, just relating to our satellite TV business, we’re now processing more than 822,000 web service calls per day for our clients, while managing Web applications in real time that are used by more than 80,000 call center agents daily—and we are exceeding 99.9 percent uptime.”

Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Having a robust platform to efficiently build new offerings and deploy programs for clients has dramatically reduced Tranzact’s time to solution. This has enabled the company to respond faster to client requests and develop sustainable competitive differentiation. “It used to take us four months to roll-out a new project for our wireless service provider clients,” commented Washburn. “Now we can do it in less than six weeks, giving us a significant competitive advantage.”

Greater Agility

Tranzact is now able to quickly change and deploy new business rules, which helps meet clients’ complex and rapidly evolving needs. Moreover, from an IT standpoint, the improved agility allows the company to create new offerings and make changes to existing offerings in a very integrated, safe and organized fashion.

Tighter Integration with Clients’ Partner Systems

Many of Tranzact’s clients outsource critical business functions to their partners. When this occurs, Tranzact must integrate clients’ partner systems with its data center. Metaphor provides Tranzact with a platform to quickly and safely enable this integration, regardless of how many integration points need to be established and how many transactions must be processed.

Reduced Client Risk Exposure

Interactive Softworks’ solutions have also reduced the inherent risks Tranzact’s clients face as they process and execute millions of complex transactions every month. For instance, a residential satellite- TV service provider receives tens of thousands of new orders every day through multiple worldwide sales channels. The variations on each transaction can differ greatly based on thousands of product, service, promotion and location combinations generated by the marketing team. The Metaphor platform provides Tranzact with an efficient and reliable way of ensuring that its clients can maintain high customer-service levels by fulfilling customer requests as promised without inhibiting the marketing team’s ability to drive the business.

Lower Development Costs

Since deploying the Interactive Softworks solution, Tranzact has reduced development costs by 30 percent through improved developer efficiency and reduced IT lifecycles. It has also reduced workforce levels while improving manageability.

“Previously, when we implemented an application, a significant portion of the work went to creating the infrastructure to make that application work,” said Washburn. “That’s no longer the case because now Metaphor is providing us with that infrastructure and we can focus on running our business.”

Increased Business Growth

The improved agility and reduced time-to-solution have also enabled Tranzact to grow its business. Washburn explained that without an infrastructure such as Metaphor that facilitates re-use, Tranzact would be forced to continually write one-off implementations for its customers and their back-end services. Not only would this approach be inefficient, costly and redundant, but more important, it would also be extraordinarily difficult to maintain and potentially cause serious disruptions to the business.

Invaluable Architectural Guidance

By relying on Interactive Softworks for critical advice on how to best architect mission-critical applications, Tranzact has been able to shift more of its efforts to the actual development of these applications.

“We can hire programmers who are proficient in solving our business problems rather than hiring experts to overcome the issues traditionally associated with developing complex, highly scalable, highly available server-side systems,” commented Washburn.

Increased Self-Sufficiency

“Interactive Softworks has not only provided us with the necessary infrastructure to meet growing client expectations, but the company has also worked closely with our internal development team to create the operational governance and implementation strategies necessary for us to maximize the benefits of the system. They’re continually working with our internal development team, teaching them how to write and deploy good applications on their own,” said Washburn. “This embedded partnership approach is one of the many reasons why Interactive Softworks has become one of our most valued partners.”

Resources

Key Resources

• A New Model for Customer EngagementLearn about the 6 steps every company needs to take for effective customer engagement.
• Customer Success StatisticsHow effective engagement helps you get and keep more customers.
• Special Technology Initiative?Tell us more about your project.