Modernising a CRM monolith

The business challenge 

Our customer, one of South Africa's largest telecommunications providers, relied on a CRM monolith integrating with more than 50 systems and serving a subscriber base of over 50 million. Non-standard interfaces meant that even small changes required costly rework, and downtime from the monolithic architecture was disrupting the business. The customer needed a way to modernise the platform without the risk of a disruptive, big-bang replacement.

The solution

ADB decoupled the monolith incrementally using the strangler pattern, progressively rebuilding business domains as API-first microservices on AWS, sitting behind an API Gateway façade. This approach allowed functionality to be migrated domain by domain, reducing risk while keeping the existing system operational throughout the transition.

The business outcomes 

The first business domain went live in production in late 2021, proving the approach in a live environment. Since then, releases happen more frequently with minimal or no service disruption, giving the business far greater agility to respond to change. The use of TM Forum Open APIs has also enabled ecosystem reuse, positioning the customer to integrate more easily with partners and third parties going forward.