case study | Crazy John's
THE writing was on the wall as a protracted and costly legal stoush between Telstra and Crazy John's drew to a close in mid-2007.
When the two parties went their separate ways, the late John Ilhan, founder of mobile phone retailer Crazy John's, knew he had to carry out his attack with precision and speed.
For more than a decade, Ilhan's $300 million company had been one of Telstra's top dealers.
The bitter divorce led to Crazy John's switching partners, aligning with Vodafone to offer products ranging from pre-paid mobile telephony to small business services at more than 100 outlets.
By piggybacking on Vodafone, Crazy John's became a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) a few months later, launching the service under its own name.
The lead time to launch was extremely short and Crazy John's had to cobble together disparate systems to meet its deadline, recalls former chief technology officer Ken Tan.
"Most companies that become a MVNO don't have a lot of money, so they tend to take shortcuts with back-end systems.
"Some would choose a telco-in-a-box system, while others would purchase some systems off the shelf and develop the rest in-house.
"John wanted to do things properly, so we began designing and documenting the business flows and use cases first," he says.
The key to removing the roadblock then became clear: "There were standalone systems such as customer relationship management (provided by Graham Technology), billing and other back-office systems such as payment gateways, mobile porting, inventory management and finance, that were not flexibly working with each other," Dr Tan says.
"Connecting them through middleware solved the problem and reduced the complexity of changing the system for changing market conditions," he says.
Crazy John's mobile network had to be highly streamlined and optimised for the beating it was about to take. "Customers don't like waiting around for provisioning and activation processes to complete, nor do they care if sales representatives need to work with many legacy systems," he says.
They're generally time-poor and intolerant of system limitations. "We needed a way to glue everything together while maintaining flexibility in the system so we would be able to modify processes according to changes in the market.
We looked around for a solution. "A number of products were evaluated before Oracle got the nod. We also looked at BEA AquaLogic but selected the Oracle suite because of its inherent integration with other Oracle products on Crazy John's platform," he says.
Solving the middleware problem was only one part of the puzzle.
Dr Tan's departure from the company in December would have left a gaping hole but he decided to remain an integral part of the Crazy John's operation.
As systems integration and software development managing director for Enterprise Glue, he continues to drive technology projects at Crazy John's, especially its MVNO business.
The Crazy John's mobile platform has "tremendous potential", he says, hinting at bigger things to come in the pre-paid space.
"There's a perception that pre-paid customers aren't creditworthy and they're consequently given less visibility.
"But pre-paid customers are actually more valuable than post-paid customers because operators are paid upfront," the Melbourne-based executive says.
Unlike traditional operators, Crazy John's chose the platform with pre-paid customers in mind.
"Crazy John's is probably one of the few telcos that can give pre-paid customers near-real-time usage. If a pre-paid customer goes into the Crazy John's portal now they can see how much they've used.
"Other carriers don't want pre-paid customers to have access to their statements because they think that might tell them they're spending too much, but we disagree."
THE PROBLEM
Crazy John's turned into a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) overnight and needed an integrated platform.
THE PROCESS
Oracle middleware tools were deployed by Enterprise Glue to bring together disparate systems, including customer relationship management and billing.
THE RESULT
Crazy John's is a fully functioning MVNO operator.
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