Headquartered in Finland, Tecnotree is a global provider of turnkey full-stack AI-embedded digital BSS solutions to telecom operators. Backed by more than four decades of deep domain knowledge, its solutions help telecom operators manage their products, customers and invoicing, to digitize their underlying processes, and to increase the value they deliver to subscribers. Tecnotree has more than 850 employees across 13 development and sales offices on five continents, generating net sales of more than 70 million euros in the financial year 2022.
With a strong footprint in developing markets such as Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, Tecnotree supports more than 70 telecom operators and cloud service providers worldwide who collectively serve more than a billion subscribers. While most telco companies have historically run their BSS systems in on-premises data centers, there is growing interest in moving to the cloud. Adopting cloud native technologies can enable much faster and more effective responses to changing patterns of demand.
Tecnotree recognized that its customers could also benefit from a cloud native approach as a way to monetize new 5G services and offerings. Here, telecom operators need to be able to deploy and scale customer-facing products much faster than before, so that they can build stronger digital relationships with subscribers, reduce time to market and improve time to revenue.
Based in Dubai, Suhail Thusu is director of technology alliances, global presales & solution architecture at Tecnotree. Having joined the company four years ago as a senior manager in the product office, he is now responsible for enabling new products through multiple technology partnerships globally. To keep Tecnotree open to new opportunities, Suhail Thusu is also helping to modernize its applications into a cloud native digital stack.
He explains: “To help the telecom industry take advantage of new business opportunities, we knew that we needed to have a more flexible solution available which would support rapid deployment and would allow scalability both in terms of increasing volume as well as changing business needs. The goal was to transform to a microservices model that would be cloud-centric without imposing cloud delivery on everyone.”
At-a-Glance
Tecnotree, a global provider of AI-embedded business support systems (BSS) to telecom operators, wanted to help its customers adapt faster and more flexibly by enabling a microservices-based containerized architecture managed with Rancher Prime, Tecnotree has significantly accelerated the deployment of its applications and given its customers exceptional flexibility in delivering new services to subscribers accelerating time to value.
The journey to containers
It is notoriously difficult to predict future trends in technology. Although telecom operators are already thinking about what 6G may bring, the monetization possibilities of 5G are still largely untapped. And since they do not know exactly what subscribers will want to do a month from now, let alone a year, telecom companies want to be able to test new ideas at high speed and low cost.
For Tecnotree, this inspired a transformation of the existing solution architecture. Unsurprisingly, given the company’s over 40-year heritage, Tecnotree had a monolithic solution that resulted in large customer deployments that were relatively difficult to manage, upgrade, scale and adapt to new challenges. The first step in the transformation was to modularize the code base into smaller components, and this was followed by the adoption of virtualization as a way to increase portability and reduce deployment complexity. This journey to build and virtualize the solution started over a decade and half ago and which finally resulted in the organic growth to a containerized solution.
“We wanted to stay ahead of industry trends by modernizing our entire stack and enabling the delivery of our full suite of BSS functionality within a cloud native application set,” says Thusu.
“The combination of Rancher Prime and Kubernetes proved ideal for our needs. The open source nature of the solutions was a major factor: we don’t want to be locked into a particular vendor or technology.”
Why Rancher Prime?
Tecnotree started by evaluating a community build of Kubernetes to manage its Puppet-based containerized deployments, but it meant it had to follow various upstream, open source projects and test the compatibility between them and the Tecnotree BSS stack. To add to it, a typical customer deployment of Tecnotree’s BSS can include anything from 70 to 200 different microservices, depending on the functional options chosen. All these factors contributed to a lot of management hassle.
The introduction of Rancher Prime helped solve these issues by providing all relevant Kubernetes components in a pre-built, tested package. Tecnotree tested Rancher Prime, initially with Cattle as the orchestration engine, replacing it with Kubernetes at a later stage.
“Our decision for Rancher Prime was about having an extra layer of management on top of Kubernetes,” says Thusu. “The combination of Rancher Prime and Kubernetes proved ideal for our needs. The open source nature of the solutions was a major factor: as we don’t want to be locked into a particular vendor or technology.”
Why SUSE Priority Technical Support?
For Tecnotree, effective vendor support is not just a question of prompt and accurate assistance when a ticket is raised. Rather, the company seeks to build trusted relationships that enable it to tap into external experience and knowledge. With SUSE Priority Technical Support, Tecnotree can quickly get answers to technical queries, but it can also speak to experts for broader guidance and advice.
This is important given the scale and criticality of Tecnotree’s customer environments. Several of its customers have more than 100 million subscribers each and depend on Tecnotree for key functionality such as CRM, billing and service provisioning.
“Having professional support from SUSE for our Rancher Prime environment was a must,” says Thusu.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Modularity enables flexible deployment
Tecnotree has adopted microservices and containerization for its entire BSS solution stack, using Rancher Prime as its strategic tool for managing its customers’ Kubernetes landscapes. The switch from a monolithic to a modular architecture has given the company the flexibility to introduce new functionality and deliver updates in a very targeted way. As a result, the frequency of new releases has increased, enabling Tecnotree to respond faster to changing customer requirements.
“With containerization built on Rancher Prime, introducing new things has become relatively easy,” says Thusu. “We can deliver improved functionality without impacting current business for our customers, and they in turn can deliver new services seamlessly to their subscribers.”
High-speed rollout to customers
A related benefit of the adoption of containerization is the speed of deployment versus the previous monolithic solution. According to Thusu, it’s a night and day difference. He says: “Even after we had adopted virtualization, it would take a couple of weeks to deploy the application for a new customer. Today, with containerization, it’s a matter of a couple of days.”
Easy development on a global scale
Tecnotree has three global development centers — in Argentina, Finland and India — to ensure that developers and architects can work geographically close to customers and in similar time zones.
With the previous monolithic architecture, it was much harder to coordinate the development and maintenance of the application. Today, thanks to microservices and containerization, projects can be divided up among the globally dispersed team much more easily.
A further advantage of Tecnotree’s global approach to development is that it positions developers and architects nearer the customers they serve, enabling a better understanding of their changing business requirements. With microservices and containerization, it is easier for local teams to create and deliver customerspecific changes to functionality. And if these customer-specific changes are relevant to others, it is now easier to fold them back into the main development branch so that all customers can benefit from them.
“With containerization managed by Rancher Prime, it’s much quicker and easier to help our customers transform in response to changing market conditions and new opportunities,” says Thusu.
Simplified management of a complex solution
Tecnotree offers multiple products to customers within its BSS solution, from CRM to digital customer lifecycle management tools. Customers can select the appropriate products to meet their business requirements and then deploy the relevant sets of microservices in containers managed by Rancher Prime. With potentially several hundred different containers to manage — and similar numbers in non-production environments — such a large solution could be difficult to manage.
Thanks to Rancher Prime, managing even the largest and most complex container landscapes is dramatically simplified. This also applies to patches and updates. Previously, Tecnotree required a team of four engineers to manage patching and testing tasks that now require only a single engineer.
“It’s now much easier to roll out and manage complex containerized landscapes,” says Thusu. “These are mission critical environments for our customers, and at this scale of operation, I think it would be impossible to manage without something like Rancher Prime. It provides a single, very neat and clean interface for all information that is easy to understand even for a nontechnical user.”
Rapid scalability in response to changing demand
Tecnotree’s BSS solution automatically instructs Rancher Prime to stand up new microservices in new containers when utilization rises beyond customer-defined thresholds. In this way, customers’ applications can scale rapidly and without delay in response to increased demand for services from subscribers. Using Rancher Prime, Tecnotree and its customers can easily access detailed information on the utilization of resources and the consumption of services, which assists with longerterm system capacity planning.
“The scalability provided by Rancher Prime is extremely important for our customers,” says Thusu.
Self-healing, resilient applications
While business support systems at telecom operators are less critical than the operations support systems that provide network connectivity to subscribers, they are nevertheless extremely important. Telecom operators expect their BSS solutions to be responsive and available at all times so that they can onboard new subscribers, support existing ones and sell new services.
By moving from a monolithic architecture to microservices running in containers, Tecnotree has significantly increased the availability of its solution. If a monolithic application crashes, then essentially all services and all user activity immediately stop. By contrast, if one out of a hundred containers goes down, and that container is running a microservice that is also running in several other containers, there may be no perceptible impact on users.
Rancher Prime helps by constantly monitoring containers. If it detects a problem, it can seamlessly either scale up any remaining containers running the same microservice or fire up a new container. This self-healing capability ensures great resilience for environments managed using Rancher Prime.
“With Rancher Prime, the failure of a container can automatically trigger self-healing or self-scaling, so that the end-customer may not even be aware that there was a problem,” says Thusu.
The impact of SUSE Priority Technical Support
For Tecnotree, rapid access to knowledgeable support from a professional global team at SUSE translates into the ability to keep its solution in optimal condition at all times. Tecnotree also values the ability to tap into SUSE’s broader experience of helping technology teams address business challenges.
Thusu explains: “We work with multiple technologies that interact in different ways. At times, it’s really helpful just to have a short conversation with someone outside of the organization when you run into an obstacle. It could be a technical issue; it could be a commercial issue. With SUSE, I can pick up the phone and have a quick call that helps me get things moving forward again.”
The internal team at Tecnotree has developed strong skills in Kubernetes, in part through its collaboration with support resources at SUSE, and in part through formal training sessions. In many cases, Tecnotree maintains responsibility for managing its customers’ on-premises deployments of its technology. But for some customers who maintain their own environments, Tecnotree has started supplying Rancher Prime as an embedded element in its solution, backed by SUSE Priority Technical Support.
“Providing Rancher Prime as part of our solution increases the value of our offering and makes it easier for our customers to access expert support directly from the vendor,” says Thusu. “From our own experience, we know that SUSE provides an excellent support service and timely responses.”
What’s next for Tecnotree?
Tecnotree has successfully completed its six-year journey to a fully microservicesbased containerized architecture for its BSS solution. Its internal teams have undergone a parallel transformation in culture and skill sets, and the company is successfully deploying its solutions to telecom operators of all sizes around the globe.
Looking to the future, Tecnotree is keen to explore additional solutions from SUSE and the broader open source community. It has already started using Longhorn, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project, for cloud native persistent block storage, and is also looking into NeuVector for container security.
“Serving the telecom industry, it’s vital for us to keep developing innovative offerings and capabilities,” says Thusu. “Our customers want to work with us as a single vendor to reduce complexity, and in a similar way we want to work with a small number of strategic partners. SUSE has a great set of interlinked products and solutions, which supports us in embracing cloud native technologies that will enable us to support our customers, whatever the future holds."