MSI supplied services for the development of a financial transactional-based application that securely accepts customer payments and updates billing systems accordingly. Agents can use the system to set up customers on debit or credit card based payment schedules. Credit deposit payments can also be accepted. Using a real-time API, credit card payments are processed immediately and, where bank accounts are provided, the transactions are processed daily.

MSi was engaged from project start to completion, from requirements gathering, application blue printing and design, hardware architecture and technology selection, to development, testing and eventual deployment and normalization. Specific deliverables and milestones included:

• Development of a front-end Web application
• Development of the normalized backend data structures
• Integration with credit card transactional services and pre-authorized debit services
• Integration with the billing systems to receive recurring billing information and posting successful payments

This application was built following PCI compliancy standards on a 3-tier web-app-database structure. The database tier is physically distributed (two data centres located in separate provinces) to ensure high availability. Disaster recovery requirements are met using technologies like Oracle’s Data Guard and Radware's Load Balancing Solutions. Other tools and technologies utilized include: Java, Servlets, Spring Framework, Hibernate, JDBC and Tomcat for the application (middle) tier and HTML, JavaScript, CSS, JSP, JSTL and TILES for the front-end tier.

MSi developed the Bandwidth Activity Tracker, an Internet infrastructure bandwidth/traffic usage collector and rater; allowing the ability to calculate the amount of data uploaded and downloaded by the customer and applies relevant charges for volume usage. The purpose of this project was to create a single tool collecting all Internet customers' usage data and enabling for the tracking and reporting of the data as well as for the application of charges against over-usage. The application includes collection of information from numerous infrastructure applications associating it to a single customer and based on predefined attributes associated with the customer’s contract the application applies relevant charges for volume usage to the customer’s bill. The system integrates back to the Billing System for applications to the bill.

MSi’s deliverables on this project included initial requirement gathering, application blue printing and design including client design signoff, the actual development of the tracking tool deploying our commonly used Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology supporting quick turnaround and midpoint milestones for acceptance testing. We also managed the unit and integration testing being fully engaged in writing test cases and overseeing the execution of the tests by the client. After go-live, MSi was contracted to support the application and is still currently providing a 24/7 support services for the tool.

In addition to the core application development and just as importantly we have developed web reports available using a secured web portal and enabling both customers and agents to track progress and provide management access to trending data on customers' usage patterns and its financial impact on overall billing . The reports developed were integrated with the billing systems allowing for a seamless billing processes and an automated bill generation.