On Wednesday, we told you how Virgin Media used Oracle IDM to allow everyone riding the London Underground to use their free Wi-Fi service.
Perry Banton from Virgin Media and Ben Bulpett from aurionPro SENA delivered a great webcast where they discussed how the project was funded, the architecture they chose, and how they overcame the inevitable roadblocks to deliver world class Wi-Fi to the underground.
If you missed it, register here for the replay. http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=558738&s=1&k=C9A6E9B7B1FD0238CF2816D5F8510694
We had some good questions about the project, so I'm putting them and the responses below:
Who sponsored the project within Virgin Media?
Mobile
and Broadband Marketing teams were the main sponsors. These teams wanted to offer a value-add to
the business. Providing a new service
offering was compelling to the business.
With such tight timeframes what project approach did
you use?
The
start of the Olympics was a hard deadline, and free wi-fi was promised by the
start. Agile planning, sprints, and
checks were used. Short segments were
rolled out. Personal devices were used
to test the service, testing was very much crowd sourced – all available
platforms had to be tested.
Is the service device specific?
No– a range of platforms were supported and tested. The requirement was to be device independent.
Why did you not build another large directory
consolidating the back end LDAPs, instead of Oracle Virtual Directory?
There
were some data ownership concerns, and the various departments didn’t want to
give up management of their customer data, also they didn’t want to setup
another LDAP, so a decision was made to use virtual directory technology. Virtual directory also provided a better
platform for building future services.
How is the system managed and what service levels are
required?
Geographically
dispersed data centers were used. Performance and availability were considered a gold service within
Virgin Media – which means there would be brand impact if the service became
unavailable. Virgin and SENA provided real
time management, with an incident response SLA within minutes of problem
detection. Oracle Enterprise Manager was
used to view system performance and availability.
How much of the service were SENA actually involved
in?
Virgin and SENA have been working on
architecture and roadmap for a long time. SENA are a gold Oracle partner with extensive experience in IDM
implementations, so Virgin engaged SENA for the implementation and support
services.
I'm not clear on why entitlements came into play. Were
this VM customers authenticating with their email addresses? Was this not open
to the general public and if so, I'm guessing you "relied" on
whatever email addresses they provided?
OES came into play when VM launched the fee paying service and only wanted certain customers to gain access based upon their subscription with VM. For the Olympics only OVD was used as a way of aggregating email addresses across the back end platform as the service was “open” to anyone with an email address