Case Study » Massive-Scale Data Migration in a Mission-Critical Environment

Telstra had a prepaid mobile phone platform that, although advanced when introduced, was becoming outdated.

After finding a new platform with the required flexibility and features, Telstra faced the challenge of migrating the customer’s service from the old platform to the new one, without disrupting service or losing data.

The risks of migrating 4 million customers to the new platform raised concerns; there were sensitive issues involved because a prepaid mobile system is similar to a bank — customers buy credits and store them on the prepaid platform. Tens of millions of customer credits, and all other service characteristics, needed to be seamlessly transferred from the old platform to the new platform without disturbing prepaid balances or interrupting mobile phone service. Loss of Telstra revenue also had to be prevented during the process.

Time was another important factor — Telstra was paying substantial fees to the existing prepaid platform vendor, so the migration needed to be completed within 3 months to minimize supporting parallel new and legacy systems.

The migration process was initially awarded to the vendor of the new system, but over time it became clear that broader knowledge across the rest of Telstra’s network portfolio and IT systems was required for the project. Telstra then invited Unico to complete the migration process.

Chris Van de Velde, Unico’s Software architect for the project explains the process. “It was a matter of analysing where the appropriate place in the IT stack was to insert the solution, such that we would be able to identify any services that failed and quarantine them to be investigated. We also had to determine at what point a service that didn’t completely migrate could lose serviceability, and what preventive action we could provide in our solution to prevent this.”

“The whole project was completed in a very aggressive time frame. In the end we achieved all the goals that Telstra was looking for in the migration” Van de Velde said.

This is one of many successful data migrations Unico has completed for Telstra, including voice mail and MMS.

Russell Williams, Unico’s General Manager of Strategy and Business Development, explains Telstra’s choice of Unico for the project. “Telstra doesn’t come back to Unico only for its technical competence. They know that we’ll successfully complete the job on time. There are many moving parts and players involved in these migrations. If someone doesn’t deliver on time, the whole thing collapses.”