A talk at Axway Connections, Axway’s customer event, held at Mercedes-Benz World on 12 June 2014. It was an updated version of the Three story I first told at the IDM Conference in 2013.
The talk opened with the relationship between Three and Axway. Three was originally a customer of Vordel’s XML gateway, selected it through a formal RFx exercise as the clear market leader, and stayed with it after Axway acquired Vordel, citing Axway’s continued commitment to development, support and customer service.
The business challenges were largely unchanged: centralising MVNO and retail transactions, automating partner provisioning, protecting revenue and shielding backend systems from spikes in partner demand. The threats covered included unauthorised access, parameter manipulation and data harvesting, network eavesdropping, disclosure of sensitive customer data and message replay.
What was new in this version:
- Learnings. Business sponsorship and ownership of middleware are hard to secure. Appliances are also hard to support in a multi-vendor environment, so Three planned to move to virtual deployment.
- Future aspirations. Upgrade from version 6.3 to 7.2 or later to stay supported, manage mobile REST protocols for app interactions, extend to multi-channel access, provide internal API management, govern cloud service consumption, integrate with Office 365, and expose corporate information to cloud services.
The closing message was that the XML gateway will only become more pivotal to Three’s success as its multi-channel and mobile app programmes grow.