Advanced Value-Added Services: Account Management

• Carrier: CDMA
• Technologies: J2ME CLDC 1.0/MIDP 1.0, J2EE, WSDL, SOAP, HTTP/HTTPS, SSL
• Mobile Devices: Sanyo MM-8300 , Samsung A630, A580

Azoft is a sub-contractor for a partner company that is building all software infractructure for emerging U.S. Mobile Virtual Network Operator targeting the Hispanic community of the United States. This MVNO is going to launch a service plan that takes into account distinctive social and cultural features of the Hispanic community and offers a value-added service having no counterparts. It will be working in CDMA standard and based on Sprint Nextel network.

Azoft is one of the sub-contractors in a large project devoted to creation of a number of value-added services. This MVNO considers Hispanic population of the United States as its target audience. The value-added services are meant to take into account such characteristics of the above community, as strong family relations and large family size, large proportion of people with no bank accounts, close relations with relatives and friends in Latin America. The huge growth of subscribers base was anticipated and this was taken into account by Azoft while designing architecture and developing service.

The Azoft’s competence within this project is the development of mobile applications that will implement the functionality required for the value-added services, and application server, that serves mobile applications and provides web-services architecture for a number of external components such as web-portal and other underlying distributed resources and services.

Azoft has developed two major value-added services: Mobile Money Transfers and Account Management. The first is money transfer application and the second is family or group plan management.

Logical View

The Account Management service is targeted to groups and families. The key feature of this value-added service is that it targets a group of people with one of them as a head (that is, a family). The head has an administrator power over the total account of the family and accounts of individual members. He can transfer money from his account to the account of any member of the family, and between accounts of family members (including himself) as well. If some family member runs out of money on his account, he still can call other family members at the expense of administrator’s account. Administrator also has power over the privileges of individual family members (such as blocking calls to certain phone numbers, restricting or blocking international calls, sms, mms, or internet).

The service plan can be managed from web-portal, customer service portal, and immediately from the mobile application. As was mentioned above, the Azoft competency within the project was development of the mobile application and application server, through which the mobile application and the web-portal interact with underlying resources and services.

The mobile application is burnt into Java-enabled Samsung handsets, which are distributed to the people signed in with the value-added services. The mobile application has customizable look&feel which is updating itself depending of user role(administrator, member or individual). Application allows for viewing members (in case of administrator – for adding and removing them), getting information about the current balance( in case of group member or individual), and transferring funds to other family members’ accounts (in case of administrator or member – between family members’ accounts).

Implementation View

The application is developed in J2ME on MIDP 1.0/CLDC 1.0 platform, and now is in the process of being ported to more powerful devices supporting MIDP 2.0/CLDC 1.1. The functions of the mobile application that require interaction with external resources are implemented through calls to web-services on the remote application server using HTTP/HTTPS. The mobile application also support connection over SSL to provide higher security level. The application server performs calls further to the distributed carrier environment and resources (users directory, billing system, money transfer components, bank and other subsystems involved in value-added services implementation and support).

Participating in the project for development of Mobile Virtual Network Operator value-added services Azoft gained invaluable experience of large project implementation together with internationally distributed teams from several other countries. Efficiency and reliability of solutions that Azoft and other teams implemented, allowed to reduce project costs by almost an order and project time – several fold compared to similar projects. MVNO being launched, Azoft will continue work on new services to enhance user experience with MVNO.

Related Projects

• Advanced Value-Added Services: Mobile Money Transfers