Customer Stories

CASE STUDY

Creating New Digital Experiences With Open Source API Management

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Halved the time to market
  • Scalable and feasible mechanism for API publishing and usage
  • Seamless integration of WSO2 technology with existing platform

Goals

  • Cellcard has a vision for creating digital lifestyles for its customers and contributing to a digitized economy. They wanted to improve their customers’ user experiences - right from the initial awareness stage itself - and provide them with digital self-care services, as well improve connectivity with external partners.
  • Cellcard identified reliability, scalability, and a reduced time-to-market as the top 3 issues to address before they started innovating with their existing enterprise integration platform.
  • Key to realizing their vision was API management and security - API connection feasibility, exposing APIs securely, the API integration process, and managing the various API protocols.

Industry: Telecommunication
Location: Cambodia

ABOUT Cellcard

Cellcard is the pioneering telecommunications company in Cambodia, with a corporate history spanning 20 years. They’ve been at the forefront of introducing innovative services to their customers - starting with SMS and roaming services in the 1990s, introducing 3G and 4G, and mobile payment mechanism. Today, Cellcard is driving the adoption of smartphone technology and mobile data acceleration, with plans to introduce 5G.

We believe that reliability and faster time to market are the key success factors. WSO2’s lightweight, highly configurable, and stable products - which are incidentally also easy to learn - have made a major contribution to the project’s success. Finally, the team at WSO2 was quick to respond to any queries and support issues.”

Soksophay Lim

CIO

Cellcard

Deployment and Approach

After the initial evaluation process, WSO2 API Manager was selected primarily for reasons of flexibility, ease of use and implementation, and the fact that it is an open source approach to full API lifecycle management. Additional reasons behind this choice include support for SOA, provision of API security, and also since the team at Cellcard was familiar with Java, they saw similarities with WSO2 API Manager.

The team at Cellcard uses WSO2 and other open source technologies across their architecture. In addition to WSO2 API Manager, they also use WSO2 Enterprise Integrator. Other open source products used include Apache Active MQ, Kafka, Microsoft SQL Server, and RedHat Enterprise.

The WSO2 powered platform has been instrumental in the transition of backend Cellcard integration from a point-to-point mesh network model into a complete microservice architecture - all in less than a year. (This incidentally also happens to be nearly half the time that was initially anticipated for this transition at the start of the implementation phase). The introduction of an API store, which functions as a registry of APIs for developers and API consumers, consists of API documentation and subscription. External parties who wish to use an API first create an application and submit information on the application callback URL and application description. An API Publisher, where all APIs are published, was also introduced. API publishers can create, scale, document, version, and obtain data on API quality and usage. Furthermore, the new architecture has enhanced the governance of API users and API workflow management functions (such as application and subscription approval) and enabled Cellcard to expose their APIs safely.

Cellcard has successfully integrated WSO2 Enterprise Integrator with its core business support systems - such as billing and payments - to support its main charging billing system (CCBS). Again, the process here was smooth and stable with minimal roadblocks. Cellcard credits the team at WSO2 for the project’s success.

RESULTS

  • The new architecture has enabled Cellcard to improve connectivity with customers and partners, setting the foundations in place for creating innovative products for their customers, introducing them to the market within a shorter timespan, and digitizing their experiences.
  • Following the success of this project to date, next on Cellcard’s agenda is the introduction of a containerised solution, moving towards an infrastructure as code (IaC) to adopt a DevOps approach.
  • Identity Management too will play a fundamental role as Cellcard looks to simplify integration with their applications further, and implement single-sign-on.

Our Products

The #1 open source hybrid API Management platform

An API-centric, cloud-native, and distributed integration platform

Open Source Identity & Access Management for Agile Businesses