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5.Mar.02--When TELUS Enterprise Solutions, one of Canada's largest service providers (SPs), and Sun Microsystems, Inc. teamed up to develop and deploy a portal-based Web infrastructure for delivering Internet applications, they demonstrated how a new technology could boost revenues and open new markets for SPs everywhere. The solution--based on the iPlanet Portal Server, iPlanet Integration Server, and other core software from the Sun Open Net Environment (Sun ONE)--was in response to TELUS's immediate need to provide IT infrastructure services to a large Canadian insurance company. Sun ONE includes Sun's vision, architecture, platform, and expertise for building and deploying services on demand. At the core of the Sun ONE platform is an open standards framework that allows SPs to rapidly develop and deploy Web-services-based portals for their customers. However, by creating the iForce Portal for service providers delivering the Sun ONE vision and architecture, the Sun and TELUS team also showed how a Web services portal can create new business opportunities that all SPs can exploit. The iForce initiative is a community of Sun, its customers, and best of breed partners working together to create and deliver customer-driven solutions that enable customers to leverage the network and improve business processes. Although Sun created the solution for a service provider that wanted to deliver insurance services, it was designed as a horizontal solution, easily adapted for creating an iForce Portal for virtually any vertical market, such as health care, telco, utilities, finance, and automotive. Changing Service Provider Role"Until recently, SPs were focused primarily on traffic over their wires," says Reed Hornberger, vice president, Solution Marketing, for Sun's Global Sales Organization. "They saw themselves as a switch, not a node. But the SP's role is changing. Now they are saying, 'let's better understand our customers' businesses and see what services we can provide.'" 
To make this shift, Hornberger says that SPs need to implement a services structure that will allow them to offer a variety of Web services. Given the rapid development and adoption of broadband technology, for example, an SP infrastructure needs to be ready for new services that have the potential to drive incrementally huge revenue streams. The Portal AdvantageHornberger notes that although many SPs are already transforming themselves into application service providers (ASPs), they currently provide services using "hard wired" approaches, such as private lines and virtual private networks. "So far, not that many SPs thoroughly understand the advantages of providing Web services through portals," he says. "But portals are key. One thing you can count on is that whatever services the SP provides today will be different a year from now--and no one knows what that difference will be." A portal allows SPs to add new functionality--different data, different data types, different applications--through the same customer interface to meet new, unexpected challenges. "For example, think how broadband will change application services," Hornberger says. "The SP will be able to go to a customer that is currently providing a static catalog of its products over the Web and offer to transform its catalog into a series of dynamic, interactive ads that use streaming audio and video and live customer response mechanisms." In this case, the SP's customer gets a far more effective product presentation, and the SP opens up new markets and builds its revenue stream. Building the TELUS Web Portal"One of the reasons we enjoyed working with TELUS so much is that they were quick to see the tremendous potential in using a portal for application services," Hornberger says. "They also realized that working with Sun and the Sun ONE platform gives them an open architecture that they can leverage to create new business opportunities. They told us that they looked at various vendors, but it quickly became clear to them that Sun offered the most complete Web services solution on the market today." "Time-to-market was another major factor in TELUS' selection of Sun as its technology partner," adds Philippe Battel, Sun Solutions manager. "TELUS launched the project for its insurance company customer in January 2001 with only an 18-month implementation window. Their goals were ambitious. TELUS planned to: overhaul its customer's IT infrastructure to effectively deliver the required business services; increase business efficiency by minimizing or eliminating manual processes, automating key paper-based functions such as reporting, billing, and payment; and build an integrated call center application to improve customer representative responsiveness. The call center had to include a high level of customer self-service." Battel says that a critical TELUS requirement was to build an extensible IT infrastructure that could support new products cost effectively and easily. The TELUS project team also had to seamlessly integrate the insurance company's legacy systems to protect existing IT investments, and ensure uninterrupted service during the deployment. TELUS implemented the iPlanet Integration Server as the core component of the integration layer in its solution architecture. This allowed administrators to change customer-facing content and services without rearchitecting the underlying IT infrastructure. By integrating a wide range of software applications and their data objects, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management, and databases, the iPlanet Integration Server enables Web services that are complete, extensible, and highly productive for their users. The iPlanet Integration Server leverages Web services standards such as SOAP and XML to perform the following functions in the TELUS solution:
Hitting the TargetThe implementation was a success and one of the Sun products that played a key role was the iPlanet Portal Server. The iPlanet Portal Server is an open, extensible, and secure portal platform for deploying business-to-employee, business-to-business, and business-to-consumer portals. iPlanet Portal Server includes all of the key services required to implement robust portals, including security, community and user management, aggregation and presentation, integration, search, and personalization. The iPlanet Portal Server allows enterprises and service providers to standardize on one best-of-breed portal product to reach different constituents, increasing reuse, lowering costs, and increasing return-on-investment. In addition to the iPlanet Portal Server, Sun and TELUS used many other products to create the solution. "There are 12 iPlanet products involved, including the iPlanet Portal Server, iPlanet Integration Server, iPlanet Directory Server, and the iPlanet User Management Suite," says Battel. The solution demonstrated a strong integration between the different iPlanet products. TELUS uses the iPlanet Portal Server, iPlanet Directory Server, and iPlanet Delegated Administration for its authentication and authorization services. It also uses the directory to synchronize its different user repositories. This particular directory deployment included thousands of users, both employees and partners. However, the iPlanet Directory Server is designed to scale to millions of users. The directory service is centralized, but TELUS uses two directories: one for TELUS' use, and the other for its financial customer's use, since the customer owns its own information. For both, it also uses iPlanet Delegated Administration to allow external users/partners/customers to access specific directory structures. It also uses the directory included in the iPlanet Portal Server as an authentication proxy that checks user credentials in the TELUS iPlanet directory. According to Battel, "We worked with various integrators to incorporate applications and products from companies such as Siebel, SAP, Remedy, BEA, Lotus, and J.D. Edwards." And, to make sure the Web services portal met all performance objectives, the TELUS development team performed a proof-of-concept test at the iForce Ready Center in Menlo Park, California. The insurance company says that the ability to customize its Web presence has allowed it to provide more meaningful content to its customers, resulting in significantly increased customer satisfaction. Competitive Advantage for Service ProvidersBill Chaisson, an architect at TELUS, comments that, "A portal allows us to monitor the quality of the information the customers receive. We can increase the speed of data delivery and improve our overall responsiveness to their changing needs. As we move forward, we have the ability to change not only what customers see, but how they interact with the business processes that reside beneath the surface." "The Web services portal approach is one that every SP can use to gain a major competitive edge," Hornberger says. "By implementing the Sun ONE Web portal, SPs can provide a wide array of Web services tailored to a specific vertical market or target audience. They can take a portal developed for one industry and easily adapt it to meet the needs of another industry; if the SP sets up to handle an insurance company, it can easily provide Web services to a bank." This added value is more than just the ability to replicate a software stack and insert some new applications and services. Through its experience with implementing Web services, the SP brings a broader business perspective to its customers--its knowledge and expertise in Web services software, architecture, and policies and procedures, and how to run Web services operations around the clock on a regional and global basis. "The Sun ONE initiative helps SPs realize the full potential of Web services," Hornberger continues. "The iForce Portal for SPs delivering the Sun ONE vision and architecture is a fully replicable solution stack that incorporates an extensible framework and an end-to-end methodology. It allows SPs to bring together their networks, applications, systems, and business processes into a single platform that can be applied to any vertical industry. They are able to offer applications services developed in-house or based on alliances with ISVs." Evolving Web ServicesHornberger says that the TELUS project provides a good indication of how portal-based Web services will evolve. "TELUS views the portal solution as a blueprint for extending its services to multiple industries," he explains. "TELUS plans to continuously add new functionality to the Sun ONE framework. Eventually all its key application offerings--such as ERP, CRM, and billing services--will be channeled through TELUS's iForce Portal for SPs. It will allow TELUS to be more competitive and build new revenue streams as the technology and its customers' needs evolve. And you can bet that other SPs will soon be moving down the same path." Read the complete TELUS Portal Success Story.
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