Telecom

Telecom Argentina is the largest telecommunications company in the country, with annual average sales of 5.5 billion US dollars.

Brief description of the company

Telecom Argentina is the largest telecommunications company in the country, with annual sales of approximately 5.5 billion US dollars.
It leads the local telephone market and also operates mobile phone service Personal and Internet service provider Arnet.
ArnetPlay is the VideoOnDemand (VOD) service provided by Arnet, both via Internet and through devices connected to the TV (STB – Set Top Boxes).

The Challenge

The VOD solution for ArnetPlay had originally been envisioned by Kit Digital, now renamed as Piksel (www.piksel.com). In implementing ArnetPlay, Kit Digital had integrated a myriad of providers and the solution was complex, poorly documented and with bugs and performance issues. Given any problem, it was very hard for Telecom to diagnose where in the platform the issue really was and to find a solution in a reasonable time frame. Hexacta was asked to act as the one-stop-shop for support, enhancement development and testing for the platform as a whole.

Once the platform was stable, a pent-up-demand for improvements needed to be addressed, so this became the new focus of the team.

Solution

Telecom and Hexacta agreed to work together for planning and execution of technical support and continuous maintenance tasks. The first objective was to keep the service running and implement provisioning improvements.
Hexacta built a team integrated by consulting engineering, developers, infrastructure analysts and databases experts. It also contracted consultant and support hours from companies referents in different topics.
The team was acquiring knowledge and expertise through planned trainings and issues solving tasks.
Once the team acquired the needed “know how”, each team member became as a referent of one part of the platform and the whole team got involved into a 7x24 support schema and continuous maintenance and improvement tasks.
Additionally, Hexacta provided support for video management tasks like encoding, packaging, protection (DRM), licensing and smooth streaming, using MS Play Ready as platform.
During the final phase of the project, the Hexacta team worked on the development of a solution for new provisioning channels like mobile devices, smart TVs and game consoles.