How Airtel is simplifying large-scale transformations & building with agility & scale using latest Integration cloud methodologies.

Ordinarily any development begins with a problem statement followed by brainstorming, architectural discussions, use case simplification & eventually arriving at a solution catering to the requirements. Then begins the development, testing & the likes taking the solution eventually to a Production rollout.

Let’s say a new system gets added to the landscape, and now the entire process gets repeated, it may be faster than earlier as the steps are already identified, however design, architecture, and development all will happen again.

With an ever-growing landscape, this sort of design leads to numerous iterations & increases complexity. To solve this problem Airtel is coming up with a design that will help simplify this design pattern for future years to come.

Current Landscape

Problem to solve:

Let’s look at an example of Airtel’s Internal Systems where the current landscape would be facing a similar transformation to enable its Finance, Supply Chain & HR systems to become reliant & future-focussed towards a faster & neater design.

• In the existing landscape, multiple systems have to interact with Financial systems for varied purposes. This interaction would be done via Batch based or API-based trigger-receive modes. This forms 1 integration between these systems.
• For another system to interact with the Financial system it would have to build a similar integration which becomes a point-to-point integration. Here the modularity of the finance system is not being explored because of various system constraints like different fields needed etc. as point-to-point integration serve only specific area of how it is built. Now, as systems keep increasing the landscape starts becoming complex with let's say wires representing connections & these connections continue to increase.
• Similarly for Supply Chain & HR systems, these wires continue to increase as systems increase. Even if one of the systems is a cloud system say HCM Cloud then also the point to point integration exists & evolve as Cloud systems offer their API, however, there is limited to no customisation/filtering that a cloud API will offer & hence the connecting systems have to build more at their end, which continues contributing to the problem of multiple point to point integration.

These multiple point to point integration also adds cost of maintenance & teams that have to support these numerous integrations leading to overhead.

How we are solving it:

A better evolved landscape is where the numerous point-to-point integrations are reduced & instead the landscape has a central layer which acts as a single source of integration. This Integration framework would in itself manage all APIs in the background & provide a platform to Create, Integrate, Manage & Monitor APIs.

• Oracle Integration Cloud is one such platform being used at Airtel which ensures that the wires between systems reduce drastically & a standardised, common approach is built between source & target systems for current as well as any future applications.
• The external system here talks to the central Integration cloud API which is common for all external systems trying to fetch or post data for a similar purpose. This leads to a rapid reduction in the wires between systems & providing an effective & eased way for external/internal systems to communicate.

Future Landscape

Let’s look at what all is being achieved with the central Integration framework

1. The integration framework offers a single layer for API management, any API that needs to go in or out will be via the central layer.
2. The framework lets users create APIs suiting varying needs. These APIs in the background call other systems as needed. However, for ensuring standardisation, Airtel is following an approach where the API remains generic & can be referenced by multiple source systems without the need for point-to-point integration
3. Monitoring of API can be centrally managed & data flows seamless governed by a single framework
4. Data security can also be centrally managed by ensuring relevant access & protocols from one framework

Further, having this Integration layer in Cloud offer the best of modernisation where costs & efforts both are efficiently managed by Airtel.

Conclusion:

Airtel has been at the forefront of adoption of technology. Digital transformation decisions are majorly meant to solve a purpose which is either Strategic or Informational or Infrastructure or Transactional. By leveraging the latest Integration cloud methodologies, here we are checking all the 4 boxes by bettering the landscape with readily available Information, Speeding up the Transactions, Solving for complex landscape & evolving into a cloud Infrastructure. All with the intent that this Strategic decision continues to pay off in years to come.