Botswana has a higher per capita cell phone penetration than South Africa. Vista Cellular, Botswana's premier cellular services provider, has invested in Sun Microsystems technology to run its entire Business Support and Control System (BSCS).
One of two mobile service providers in the country, Vista Cellular has a customer base numbering approximately 28 000.
"Roll-out of cellular technology has been fairly rapid here," says Harry Ward, general manager of Vista Cellular, awarded a cellular license in February 1998. "We now cover most of the populated areas of the country. Botswana's population is 1.5million, spread over a country the size of France and the total market size for the cellular industry is probably in the region of 200 000.
"Our BSCS is not the heart of our IT systems, providing much more than just billing for our customers. The most important part however is the production of bills, on time and correct every time. We are a service industry and the customer expects, quite rightly, that we provide excellence of service both via our network and through our customer support and billing systems."
The company needed to upgrade its existing Sun server technology to run its BSCS. Developed by LHS in Germany, it draws its information from an Oracle database of customer information. The server was also required to cope with the growth of the business and to provide for future expansion into other business areas.
Vista Cellular opted for the Sun Enterprise 5501 which offers exceptional scalability and availability, and is often the server of choice for service providers in the IT and telecommunications industries.
"Sun offered us not only the right price, but more importantly, local support - the best value for money package," says Ward.
"The server was commissioned in four working days, a significant achievement for a fairly complex installation involving Oracle, OSI, X.25 and FTAM communications and the real-time BSCS system," says Anthony Duckworth of EC-Botswana, Sun Microsystems' reseller and service partner in Botswana. "Vista has managed to reduce their billing cycle to some 15% of the former cycle. This clearly demonstrates the merit in moving business computing to a state of premier computing."
"Installation happened on time with amazingly few glitches, and we look forward to a long-lasting relationship with Sun and EC-Botswana," says Ward.
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