Seamless Mule Solution Integration for Dutch Telecom

Provided services

Backend Development, Software Integration Services

Client

We worked with a company that provides digital expense tracking services to the telecommunications sector with over 20 years of experience around the globe. They offer solutions to corporate clients and specialize in telecommunications costs optimization, being a key player in the international corporate services market.

Product

The constant swapping of SIM cards or searching for a cheap roaming provider has become a major pain nowadays because borders are becoming more transparent and business and personal travel abroad is commonplace. The solution to this problem is our client’s product, the Webbing SIM card. It is designed to simplify mobile communication when traveling abroad.

The Webbing SIM card is a unique device that works on the networks of most global mobile operators without the need to change the card when moving between countries. This helps users to always be online, hence minimizing the cost of mobile communication and using multiple SIM cards.

Key Features and Benefits:

This solution has a universal application: Appropriate for individual travelers as well as the employees of international companies that are always on the move between countries and offices.
It’s easy to install and use: no additional settings required — simply insert into your mobile phone, and you are good to go.
Suitable for corporate System Integration: This is an excellent option for those companies that need to reduce the headache of accounting for telecommunications expenses incurred by their employees while on business. Webbing SIM cards integrate seamlessly with existing accounting systems and automate mobile communication expense tracking.

Webbing SIM card users can move between countries without having to change operators or SIM cards. The product will auto connect to local mobile networks and get the best balance of cost and quality of service. With coverage of most mobile networks worldwide, users have continuous mobile internet access

Challenge

Our client provides digital expense tracking services to a large international agency with over a hundred offices worldwide. Employees of the agency actively use Webbing SIM cards. So, a task that our team had to solve was incorporating Webbing card costs into the client’s existing suite of services. The client required a solution developed on Mule as its infrastructure already included Mule applications. Extracting call information from raw data of mobile operators (there are many of them) is challenging, hence the need to obtain data from Webbing web services.

Our goal was to integrate one of the main software products of a world-renowned company into our client’s infrastructure, which demands technical compatibility and flawless stability from the very start. Reputational risks for our client were high: it was necessary to ensure maximum application stability with minimal errors in order to affirm its status as an innovative leader.

Solution

Facing our challenges, we adopted a Test-Driven Development (TDD) strategy, laying a solid foundation for a reliable and stable solution from the outset. A key success factor was our focus on test case development and test automation.

Given the requirement to obtain call information from Webbing web services, we proposed a solution to transform the detailed information from Webbing services into the necessary format and save it in a database for the client to further work with the data. The integration scheme of the solution with the client’s existing infrastructure is shown in Figure 1.

Mule app — Figure 1 - Application Workflow with Webbing and Client's Database

Subsequently, client services, such as accounting, can access expense data in a format convenient for them. Thus, employees no longer need to manually process large volumes of data and enter it into accounting software.

To ensure high compatibility and flexibility, our application uses SOAP requests to interact with Webbing web services. This opens up broad possibilities for future integration and development of client applications meeting the specific requirements.

Processes Improvement

As per customer request to reduce deployment and testing time so developers can focus more on actual product development, we implemented Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) process. This automation has streamlined the build, test and deploy phase big time.

Using Jenkins, we created a system where each commit triggers a project build. Successful builds lead to automated unit tests and, if those tests pass, the build is considered successful. Jenkins checks for new successful builds periodically and deploys them to the server, reducing the manual effort for build, test and deployment tasks.

Development Approach

High-load system development requires designing for potential peak loads and empirically validating the system can handle loads. Our team did load testing to ensure performance standards, found and fixed the bottlenecks and confirmed the system meets performance criteria under extreme loads.

We optimized the computational resource usage. Through profiling we found and fixed the resource-hungry system components and improved server and overall system performance. This not only improved user experience by reducing response time but also reduced infrastructure maintenance cost.

We covered core functionality with unit tests to maintain quality and minimize risks with new feature implementation. Early bug detection reduced the debugging and testing time in later phases of the project,with unit testing being the foundation of our quality improvement strategy.

For our Mule ESB based integration solutions, detailed error handling was critical. We created a specific exception-handling strategy for each integration flow in Mule so that critical process interruptions are minimized and the system can respond to different failure scenarios in a fine-grained way.

Technological Overview

The developed solution is a Mule application that operates as follows:

1. The process begins with regular requests to Webbing services at set intervals using the Quartz scheduler task.

2. Responses from Webbing, received in XML format, are deserialized into Mule’s internal data representation, that allows for precise filtering and processing of information. A key aspect is the ability to filter out already processed data and further filter according to specific criteria, such as prefix.

3. After the filtering stage, data is transformed back into XML format and saved in the client’s system along with corresponding action logs.

Result

Our team successfully integrated a digital costs tracking service within Webbing SIM cards for a global agency with a large office network. This opened up a potential new service line for the client and strengthened their brand as an innovative leader in digital telecom technologies.

Using existing Mule technology in the infrastructure, our team implemented a reliable solution for gathering and analyzing call data automatically from Webbing SIM cards. This solution provided faultless application performance right from the first day of service, thus minimizing reputational risks and once again confirming the client’s commitment to quality and stability in all products.

The project empowered agency staff to travel globally with an efficient mobile expense management tool for internal process optimization and real-time telecom expense management — the decisive advantage that any business needs today.

Most of our developments of Mule solutions were documented in “Best practices for Mule project” and later formed the basis for an article on effective Mule ESB utilization: Best practices for Mule projects. This project underlines our ability to execute complex challenges while pursuing high quality and reliability to promote the progress of global digital technology.