How We Built a Multifunctional IoT Portal in Just 3 Months to Streamline M2M Telecom B2B Processes
Project highlights
About the client
About the client
British Telecom Group is one of the world's leading communications services companies, headquartered in London. As the UK's largest provider of mobile and fixed communications solutions, BT provides IoT connectivity, supplying SIMs, and a secure network for devices, among other services.
To manage SIM card distribution, track traffic usage, and bill customers, BT Group used Cisco-owned platform, Jasper. However, the platform lacked some essential features like flexibility on commercial models for billing customers, visual data representation and reporting functionality. As the customer base and volume of usage continued to increase, BT Group started to look for a better solution that would suit their needs perfectly.
Nextgen Clearing, the market-leading provider of global roaming services, already had an ongoing collaboration with BT Group and partnered with Flyaps to build a bespoke IoT platform.
CLIENT REQUEST
BT Group needed a custom solution to streamline IoT management and unify all the business processes through a single system.
BT Group needed an IoT portal that would streamline the whole business cycle, from registering SIM cards and their distribution to offering the clients the most suitable tariff plans, collecting data about traffic usage and creating invoices.
Apart from the advanced functionality, a custom portal was needed to expand BT's services and offer a system that can be used by their clients as a white-label tool. Such a solution would help not only BT Group but their clients as well, allowing them to track their SIMs and data usage and invite other businesses, their own clients, for streamlined cooperation.
Subscription-based solutions such as Jasper couldn’t offer such functionality, so BT Group decided to build a custom IoT portal.
problem
The solution had to solve two major challenges
Our team has significant expertise in the telecom industry and has built complex solutions for global enterprises. What’s also important, we had the right development resources to kick off the development right away and deliver the project on time. We excel at building complex tech products and working with tight deadlines. Combining our forces with Nextgen Clearing, we started building a custom tool for one of the world’s leading telecom enterprises.
approach
To build a complex product in 3 months, we opted for microservices architecture. We divided the team into specialized groups, each focusing on a specific module, allowing for independent development and streamlined the process with CI/CD operations and professional DevOps tools.
The deadline was tight: we needed to build a portal with several modules and all the essential functionality in only 3 months. To deliver a well-thought-out solution in such short terms, we decided to divide the product into independent modules and develop them separately, letting team members work on each module simultaneously. Excluding long cycles and waiting periods, we streamlined the whole development process and achieved zero bottlenecks.
solution
We needed to build a complex solution that would serve as an all-in-one platform for the IoT domain. To fit everything into one system, we split the product into four major modules, each with its own functionality:
Building such a complex system in 3 months is a challenging task, but Flyaps managed to deliver on time and implement all the needed functionality.
It’s a real challenge to deliver a complex product – especially within a tight deadline. Even with all available development resources there might be bottlenecks and long waiting periods, so we needed to ensure that no one is blocked by the work of others.
We tackled this challenge by segregating the development into many relatively independent apps and creating multiple teams – each responsible for one app or group of applications. Streamlining the whole process, it allowed everyone to focus on specific tasks.
The common difficulty with microservice architecture is ensuring seamless integration and infrastructure management. It could be a hassle to manage microservices-based applications unless you have streamlined CI/CD operations and professional DevOps engineers responsible for that.
To assure the integration of microservices between each other, we set bundles for versions of microservices and fully automated releases. Using the versioning we assured smooth integration between different modules and built a complex product in the shortest time possible.
Microservices architecture can cause another issue, which is design inconsistencies. With many modules in development, it is a challenge to create a consistent look and feel for every chunk of functionality.
At the start, we created a clickable prototype using the design system in Figma. An integral part of our approach, prototyping allowed us to get feedback at the initial stage of the development and make changes right away. Changing the prototype on the fly during workshops with a client, we made sure the interface is intuitive and fully responds to the needs of end users.
To ensure the same look and feel in every module of the portal, we successfully adopted a micro frontends approach and used Material-UI — an open-source UI framework with pre-designed components. Customizing them to our client’s corporate style, we leveraged theming capabilities and programmed the design guide in Storybook. Adopting micro frontends, we significantly reduced the time on UI development – as we implement changes to one element, it is automatically updated in all systems, making the frontend development fast and almost effortless.
With a micro frontends approach and creating a design guide, we managed to make the UI of all the modules consistent and easily scalable.
As long-term partners of Nextgen Clearing, we had prior experience in building custom telecom products together – for example, Connected Platform, the first tool we built for Nextgen. Serving as a unified way of application delivery within the Nextgen ecosystem, the Connected Platform architecture was similar to the IoT portal.
Now, as we faced the challenge to build a complex solution in 3 months, previous experience played a crucial role. Saving time, we successfully adopted parts of the code that we wrote earlier for Connected Platform, customizing them for another product of Nextgen.
We already had several microservices to manage organizations, users and user applications. They were universal enough so we could reuse them without changes, spending time only on configuration and deployment of the code for the IoT portal.
Niche expertise in the telecom domain and prior experience allowed us to build a complex platform in a matter of months.
As a leading British telecom enterprise, BT Group has a large system of interconnected applications. The IoT portal needed to seamlessly enter into the existing ecosystem of BT products to avoid disruption of any of the processes.
To enable seamless connection, we needed to assure integration with their existing BT SAF system, an authentication platform based on the Azure directory. The BT SAF platform allowed adding a client to a company’s system and it was essential to preserve the same workflow for registration in the IoT portal.
To allow fast integration, we used Keycloak, an identity and access management solution that enables users to log in once and gain access to multiple applications without the need to provide credentials for each application separately. With Keycloak, we enabled the OAuth2 protocol that allows users to save user profiles, manage access, and configure identity providers.
To seamlessly integrate Keycloak into our solution, we customized and aligned it with the company’s visual style. The user registration in the system now appears as part of our platform while it’s handled by another solution.
With advanced development tools and domain expertise, we managed to deliver the product on time and go live in just 3 months. Flyaps created a scalable platform with all the essential functionalities that can be developed further, adding new features and enhancing the existing ones. To see more details about the product, read a press release published by BT Group.
Result
Unifying all the functionality into one system, we built a platform that streamlines all the business processes from client registration to invoicing, greatly reducing the time spent on manual operations.
By using sophisticated algorithms and user-friendly dashboards, we simplified the data analysis process and enabled data-driven decision-making with real-time updates.
Both a custom tool and a white-label product, the solution we developed opened a new stream of revenue for BT Group, serving as a multifunctional platform for numerous IoT enterprises.
After testing all the modules, the product was called unbreakable – we put all our effort into making it fast and resilient to any breaches. Now that we’ve built the right architecture and key functionality, the company is working on the second release, adding more complex variations for rate plans.
