Customer Success - Verizon

Verizon Achieves Rapid Recovery Of NYC Phone Service After September 11th Tragedy Using Viper Application

After the September 11th tragedy, New York City was faced with yet another seemingly impossible feat: recovery of communications. Those responsible for the restoration of vital communication services were faced with the decisions of how to best reassemble a mind-boggling collection of hardware and information quickly and efficiently. In order to get to evaluate how to best allocate limited equipment to get the most lines working the soonest, Verizon Communications, a major telecommunications provider in New York City, turned to Ajilon Consulting to create Viper, a software application that could help plan and oversee the restoration.

Situation

After the September 11th tragedy, Verizon was faced with the enormous task of restoring telephone serviceto thousands of people and businesses in New York City as quickly as possible. Data and equipment had been damaged or destroyed and Verizon managers needed to decide how to best allocate existing equipment, how to help the most customers fastest, and how to impact the fewest customers.

The recovery of communications would be no small feat. In New York City, the infrastructure that carries calls, the switching circuits that route calls, the lines to individual phones, and the support databases that match logical phone numbers to physical phone lines were all destroyed, damaged, or severed from the rest of the system. Those responsible for restoring this vital communication had to decide how to reassemble this mind-boggling collection of hardware andinformation quickly and efficiently. They needed to evaluate where to best allocate limited resources to get the most lines working the soonest, and decide what replacement equipment would be necessary where. Challenges to overcome:

  • Managing the rapid restoration of service to customers without impacting other customers.
  • Handling thousands of internal users via intranet.
  • Unpredictable increases in database size.

Solution

Verizon Communications already had a tool at hand that could take on the monumental task of assisting in the allocation of the limited resources now available. As with many others who wereyanked from their usual routines to assist in recovery from this crisis, this existing tool, known as Mustang, was drafted from its original purpose of assisting Verizon managers in planning and analyzing the status of work orders, to handle a far more urgent assignment. "Mustang was one of a variety of projects we worked on for Verizon over several years," said John Keefauver, senior account manager for Ajilon. Ajilon originally designed Mustang to handle several related tasks. It could be used as a day-to-day project management tool, to keep an eye on various orders and projects. The application also had the ability to provide a historical overview of completed projects and orders - offering analysts insight into obstacles faced in past projects and enabling decisions in pending projects to predict the outcome of different approaches. For example, if Verizon replaced unit A instead of Unit B, Mustang could anticipate if that decision would result in faster service to customer and how it would impact current service.

As with previous projects for Verizon, Mustang involved Microsoft products, such as Visual Basic (VB6) and SQL Server. In the weeks preceding September 11th, Ajilon was already in the process of migrating this existing Visual Basic 6 and Active Server Pages (ASP) application to .NET technology. Approximately 80 percent of the .NET version was completed by September 11.

Verizon-Viper application architecture.
When Verizon approached Ajilon with an urgent need for new features, Ajilon realized that, although the VB version of Mustang was complete, it would be faster to finish the rest of the .NET version and use it as the basis for the new features. This application, code-named Viper, was completed over the course of a weekend.

Viper's .NET technology was able to easily handle the new features, including the new user interface which is feature rich and required less development then the original.

Benefits

Rapid Development and Short Implementation Time
Ajilon developers appreciated the objectoriented features of VB.NET, particularly inheritance which allowed them to write objects and inherit from them, savingdevelopment time and effort. As an example, All of the ASP.NET pages of the Viper application have a menu across the top, which were developed using a beta version of Infragistics WebNavigator element. Ajilon developers created a base class, and all other pages inherit from the class-allowing code reuse over hundreds of pages. The menus change automatically, depending on the specific page attributes and the user. In addition, changes can be added to the base class as Verizon requires and those changes propagate automatically through all inheriting pages.

Rapidly Handle and Scale Large Volume of Data
Viper has the ability to scale rapidly to handle a large volume of data, coping with unpredictable, ad hoc increases automatically. The .NET technology satisfied that requirement handily. "The database grew by 6 gigabytes within a week," observed McCabe. "Verizon was pleased with the performance, which required no special optimization. Surprisingly, despite all of the new features, the .NET code base was about 15 percent smaller than the original VB application. The rapidity with which Ajilon was able to accommodate new features has impressed Verizon, and it has expressed confidence in Viper as a basis for new features.

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