Cricket
Upgrading the Business with APIs
Cricket provides wireless services to more than 5.4 million customers in all 50 states.
Giving Wireless Customers Something to Smile About
Cricket Communications, the operating subsidiary of AT&T, is a rapidly expanding, nationwide low-cost provider of mobile wireless services. Cricket is the sixth-largest wireless telecommunications network in the United States.
Cricket’s rapid growth into new markets left it with aging systems that were unreliable, provided little process visibility, and increased customer churn. These systems led to slow time-to-market response and difficulty integrating with resellers – a key component of expanding network reach.
Dialing in to the Power of APIs
We built a modern API architecture and extended Cricket’s existing SOA infrastructure to ease the integration of new systems and partners. The new API program exposed a layer of services that external partners could access using secure channels. Using APIs, we built monitoring for service level agreement (SLA) integration including time-to-live, response time, permissions, and access control. We also designed and built an extended SOA platform to support the implementation and business-process integration of the following:
- Billing system replacement analysis and integration
- New point of sale system analysis and integration
- Platform for new supply chain management
- Local number portability application replacement and integration
- Master data management of location and product information
- Integration with a third-party vendor for electronic payments processing
- Enterprise-wide system refactoring to support a major new product launch
- Assessment and recommendations for more strategic test data management
- New data management processes and reverse engineering of the existing ETL/data warehouse infrastructure
Cricket reduced time to market with a more agile process for onboarding vendors and extended product launch capabilities.
Results
Chirping with Agility and a Faster Time to Market
The new API and extended SOA platform enabled Cricket to implement several major systems very quickly and:
- Improved visibility into enterprise-wide system events and exceptions
- Increased purchased software ROI through reusable services
- Enabled more agile on-boarding of new vendors and extended product launch capabilities
- Established error-management and audit-logging SOA utility services
- Paved the way for complete SOA and API adoption within Cricket
- Reduced total software cost of ownership
