Improved time-to-market and scalability for m3connect

Telecom
Software Architecture

Location:

Germany

Industry:

Telecom

Technology

Partnership period:

January 2020 - present

Client background

M3connect is one of the biggest wireless internet service providers in Europe. The company has offices in Aachen, Karlsruhe, Berlin, San Francisco, Sibenik and serves customers in more than 20 countries.

M3connect specializes in digital signage, guest infotainment systems, VoIP, VoD, and location-based services. Also, the company sets up a private 5G network core for leading industrial companies (such as the BMW Group).

Business challenge

Architecture redesign to enable in-flight portability for T-Mobile users;
Technical modernization to support a growing customer base and leverage new business opportunities discovered within an extensive partner network: from product deployment for local businesses to collaboration with global commercial airlines that provide on-board services;
Over 300 epics/stories need to be processed in the backlog to meet the client’s airline requests.

N-iX approach

The N-iX team has started the project with a Discovery phase to identify key challenges, choose the most suitable architecture design, and prepare a roadmap for the solution implementation. Our experts have performed a technical audit of the current architecture and designed a backlog. To match the scalability and maintainability requirements, our specialists have designed a new system which required migration from monolith to microservices. We have designed all necessary documentation for successful project kick-off, including work breakdown structures, team composition, implementation roadmap, efforts, and budget estimations.

Implementation

Due to a change of business priorities caused by M3connect’s entry into new markets, the client needed to transform a web server solution to enable in-flight connectivity.

M3connect had a high-level concept of the transformed solution but needed technical help in selecting technologies and designing the architecture. We advised the client to start with the Discovery phase, during which the following challenges were found:

long time-to-market for new features;
a large and unprioritized backlog;
high cost and impact of introducing changes;
legacy technologies;
scalability issues.

Our team has successfully completed the following project deliverables:

Performed technical project assessment;
Designed new architecture for in-flight connectivity;
Designed a migration plan from monolith to microservices and suggested a new tech stack (Java 11, Spring Boot, Kubernetes) to reach the short time to value/market, enable cost-effective development, improve operations and support;
Designed a phased migration strategy to achieve business and technical value in early stages;
Identified a high-level roadmap for the following year;
Processed a big portion of the epics/stories and added business features to the overall roadmap;
Prepared technical and DevOps backlogs;
Calculated costs and efforts needed to achieve the required business goals;
Built a test automation framework from scratch and included automation testing in the CI process by using Java 11, Spring Boot, Docker, MockServer.

Value delivered

By partnering with M3connect, N-iX helped te client obtain several important advantages:

Built new architecture to enable unlimited scalability and prepare a baseline for 5G core use-case;
Documented all changes and new functionality to enable effective knowledge retention;
Prepared detailed estimates of costs, resources, and efforts required to handle workload within the first quarter, which ensured efficient budget planning;
Introduced a test automation framework, which significantly improved time-to-market.