Nextel

Nextel Communications is a leading provider of trucking solutions integrated with cellphone technology in Argentina.

Brief description of the company

Nextel mobile communications in countries like Argentina, and Brazil, are part of NII Holdings, a stand-alone, publicly traded company that is not owned by Sprint Corporation. The company has a wide national and regional coverage with 1.75 million active customers.
It has been awarded with some quality prizes, like “Premio Nacional a la Calidad” and with “Plata/Accesit” in 2004 and “Premio Iberoamericano de la Calidad” in 2006.

The challenge

Nextel Communications belongs to NII Holdings INC, one of the leader providers in mobile communications for corporate clients in Latin America, operating in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru.
It offers a completely integrated wireless communication device that includes mobile phone calls, texting, data transmission and wireless access to the Internet.
The main goal of this project was to build a system that was able to support all Nextel’s sale process through two tools: a mobile and a web application with rich and complex front-end.
The technological challenge of the mobile application was to allow its users to work both online and offline, and synchronize the information with central servers.
Hexacta was chosen to design and develop an integral solution that takes into consideration Nextel´s new necessities and their legacy systems.

Solution

Hexacta started working with Nextel in the design and development of the solution.
The system required extremely high levels of integration with complex legacy systems. This is why about ten people from Nextel, including technical specialists and functional analysts, were added to the team.
A third company was engaged to perform functional testing.
The project was divided into two main phases, the first one for the mobile application to be used through PDAs, and the second one for the web application.
Because of the complexity of the challenge, the solution included both Java and Microsoft .Net technologies and Oracle 10g and Microsoft SQL Server Mobile Edition as database servers respectively.
The first phase required higher .Net skills than Java, along with more functional analysis and architecture capacities. For those reasons, the team changed along with the project´s skills demands.