OJSC "World Trade Center"

About "World Trade Center"

"World Trade Center" (WTC), is the largest business-complex in Russia, which provides a wide range of business services up to the world class. WTC is located in the business part of the city, not far from the Third transport ring, near the exhibition complex "Expocenter" and the business-complex "Moscow-city" in the process of construction. A unified architectural complex of WTC with the area about 200 000 sq. km unites two office buildings, a Congress center, a high-grade hotel "Crowne Plaza" and the apartment hotel "Mezhdunarodnaya-2".

The Committee for Standards, Quality and Cooperation of the World Trade Center Association (WTCA) has developed an optimum list of services and standards of their quality for the trademark "World Trade Center" (WTC). According to results of service certification, which is carried out by the Association committee, the Moscow WTC received a silver certificate of WTCA, which proves its high quality. There was made a special mention of congress and exhibition organization services and use of advanced technologies – they received the sign "Best Practices", as "performed with the highest quality".

The main goal and mission of the WTC is support of the business-community in development of business contacts and foreign trade. WTC carries out works on provision of objective information about economic and industrial potential of Russian regions, helps their promotion in the business environment and development of foreign trade relations in accordance with world standards of business conduct.

Customers of the Moscow WTC receive more than 500 different services. The modern infrastructure, which includes everything required for successful work and recreation, high service level and expert knowledge of the personnel attract businessmen from many countries of the world to the WTC. Today here operate about 400 representative offices of Russian and foreign companies, banks, air companies, tour agencies, national and international organizations. Due to a wide range of services, the trade mark "World Trade Center" is well appreciated in the whole world.

Business tasks

Within the framework of WTC reconstruction which was performed by the company KROK there were set the goals to develop competitive capability of the company in the short run and in the long run, ensuring of the highest technological level of event holding (congresses, conferences, exhibitions, shows, meetings of chief executives, etc) in the WTC in accordance with the modern tendencies. Reconstruction supposed modernization of interior appearance and technical capabilities of the Congress-center, according to the highest world standards. The new technical infrastructure of the WTC included a complex solution, one of the main components of which is subsystems of the wireless data transmission network (WDTN) and local area network (LAN) and the automated billing system (B&CC).

This subsystem had to include a modern billing solution, which would provide high-quality service of Internet access using the wireless technology (WiFi), as well as the Ethernet connection. Access to the Internet via the WDTN using payment cards had to be given to customers over a portal solution, which makes receiving of services by subscribers easier. In addition, the portal solution must enable subscribers to interactively manage their services, connect to additional services, get statistics on specific services. The system also had to give the possibility of integration with third-party systems, which will be required in the course of company’s development.

The solution and what has been done

Within the framework of the reconstruction project, carried out by KROK in the "World Trade Center", B&CC Billmaster, developed by the Inline Telecom Solutions, was chosen for creation of the subsystem of the wireless data transmission network (WDTN), local area network (LAN) and automated billing system (B&CC).

B&CC Billmaster allowed to organize provision, tariffication and accounting of wireless (WiFi) Internet access services, provided to visitors of "CrownPlaza" and participants of business events, which are held in the Congress-center, as well as to perform accounting of permanent Internet connection services, which are provided to companies in the WTC business center.

The service of wireless (WiFi) Internet access is provided on the basis of the Cisco ISG (Intelligent Service Gateway) technology, which is managed with the help of B&CC Billmaster, and it allows to organize tariffication and management of service availability in real time. Cisco ISG – is designed for companies, which offer access to intranetwork, internetwork, Internet-resources via broadband communication channels. ISG allows customers to receive dynamic access to network resources and telecommunication services, such as: videoconferences, multimedia broadcasts, Internet resources, private networks, game servers, VoIP and more.

In case of a traditional operation scheme telecommunication services and ways to access them are strongly interrelated, which fact prevents from dynamic connection of existing customers to new services. Another disadvantage of the traditional scheme – methods of service tariffication are strongly bound to methods of access.

ISG separates services and methods of their accessing. This allows customers to dynamically subscribe for services, use different payment schemes depending on what is more profitable (for example, to pay for services according to time or according to traffic), choose service providers. Such features of ISG facilitate attraction of new customers and largely determine direction of the telecoms service sphere improvement.

The Internet "access point" for users, who connect to the wireless (WiFi) network is the BISA (Built-In Service Activator) authorization portal, which was developed by Inline Telecom Solutions. The authorization portal is used for authentication of service users and de/activation of separate ISG services. The portal supports several languages and extension means. Customers register at the BISA portal and subscribe for services, using any Web-browser. Conjointly, ISG ensures authorization of customers and selection of telecommunication services.

The Cisco ISG/SSG support module is used as a policy server for Cisco ISG. This module allows to use Billmaster for management of ISG-services: authorization of customers, setting of ISG-service profiles, proxying. Particularly, in the ISG-service profile in B&CC Billmaster there is an option to set bandwidths for sessions. In the solution the ISG functions are realized on the basis of Cisco 7206VXR router with specialized software IOS IP BASE v. 12.2(33)SRC.

In future, in order to increase business efficiency and quality of provided services, it is planned to carry out works on integration of B&CC Billmaster with bookkeeping systems and the existing property management system (PMS) Micros Fidelio Opera.

Results

As a result of B&CC Billmaster implementation within the project of Congress-hall reconstruction in the "World Trade Center", carried out by the KROK company, there were achieved the following results:

• possibility to provide high-quality Internet-access via the WDTN;
• possibility of development and quick launching of new, competitive services;
• high flexibility of provided services without any decrease in the billing solution performance;
• quick realization of different marketing initiatives and activities;
• high performance of the billing solution allows to provide a great number of different services;
• portal solution for Internet access via WDTN, which allows to use services without delays and in any place where WDTN works;
• availability of interfaces for integration with the existing property management system (PMS) and other software solutions in order to optimize service provision processes and decrease the cost of their provision.